Getting Started with Polymer

Key Features

• Get to grips with the principles of Material Design and Google Web components
• Make full use of the Polymer Designer Tool, Polymer Starter Kit, and Dart to create responsive web apps
• An in-depth guide with real-life examples so you can learn everything you need to know about Polymer

Book Description

Polymer is a library that helps you develop fast, responsive applications for the desktop and mobile web. It uses the Web Components specifications for the components and Material Design concepts to create a beautiful user interface.

This focused, fast-paced guide deals with Polymer web components. We will cover layouts, attributes, elements, and handling touch and gesture events. You will also see how to build custom web components and applications using Polymer. Don’t want to code? You can make the most of the Polymer Designer Tool app and create your own app without coding at all. Finally, you will see how you can improve your Polymer application by reading the best practices from Google Polymer team.

By the end of this book, you will be equipped with all the necessary skills to use Polymer to create custom web components.

What you will learn

• Understand the basics of web components such as Shadow DOM, HTML imports, Templates, and custom elements
• Familiarize yourself with the principles of Material Design
• Install Polymer on your system and create your project structure
• Use the different Polymer 1.0 elements in your code
• Work with Polymer.dart and create your own app
• Get to know the best practices in Polymer programming from the top guys in the Polymer team

About the Author

Arshak Khachatrian is a programmer who was born on May 16, 1997, in Yerevan, Armenia.

Since an early age, he has always been interested in computers, and after turning 10 years old, he had his first computer presented to him on his birthday by his father. A week later, Arshak was supporting all the computers in the entire town by installing the Windows operating system and solving various OS issues.

After completing primary school, he decided to study mathematics and physics in high school and enrolled at Polytechnic High School, where he deepened his knowledge of mathematics and physics. Following this, Arshak was accepted in the Tumo Center. At Tumo, he first encountered programming languages, using them to design sites and program robots and fountains. A year after graduating, Arshak decided to create his first big project, the solar system in the browser, and one week after that, he started writing a hard code that he published on a social network. Soon after, he was called to work with the X-Tech company as a JavaScript developer. It was the beginning of his career. Then, Arshak accepted an offer from the BetConstruct company and developed his knowledge in the programming sphere. Thereafter, he decided to support Google and change the world by joining the Google Developers Group Armenia in 2014 and then started to contribute to the Polymer team by writing articles and creating open source components and tools for customelements.io.

In November, 2015, Arshak had a Polymer Code Lab at GDG DevFest at TUMO. In 2016, he and his fellow designer Serge Navasardyan decided to found their startup based on a 360 website builder called POP360.

Finally, in March 2016, Arshak joined the famous programmer Rouben Meschian and started working with the Cambridge Semantics company in Boston.

Table of Contents

1. Web Components
2. Material Design
3. Introduction to Polymer
4. Polymer Elements
5. First Application with Polymer
6. Polymer Designer Tool and Polymer Starter Kit
7. Working with Polymer.dart
8. Best Practices