Chrome, HTML5, JavaScript, mobile, webdev

Polymer And Web Components At I/O 2014

This talk cover three main subjects:

  • State of the union – What has change in the past 3 years
  • Problems solved by web components – When it comes to build complex web applications, there are many ways we can do things better. In this section we will see how/why.
  • Thinking in components – What are the implications when you coming to design and build web apps.

== Psst… It’s in raw format – I will polish it after I/O is over ==

State of the union

Once many years ago… We had HTML4 with all its problems. Later, well few years back, HTML5 was the answer for everything. It specifically, tried to show developers what can be done on the web modern platform and moreover APIs browser vendors could add to help developers boost their productivity. In the past 18 months we saw a lot of things like: templates, shadow dom, data binding etc’. It’s been a long journey. Now, we have Polymer. Continue reading

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Chrome, HTML5, JavaScript, webdev

Web Components On Google Developers Live Israel (Part 1)

Google Developers Live Israel

Today, in our weekly Google Developers Live Israel show we spoke about HTML5 and web component. It was a macro level overview on this new edge of front-end development. This new project is composed of a group of technologies that should help us (web developers) create moderan web apps using HTML, CSS and JS. They do this by allowing toolkit makers to encapsulate their widgets and UI elements as easily reusable components.

We covered the main players:

  • Templates – We can think on it as a new HTML element. It allow us to inert chunks of clonable DOM that can be activated for later use (e.g MDV). You can think of it as objects you creating out of your class definition. This new ‘object’ can contain markup (=CSS) and script (=JS) so it’s much more powerful from the ‘just’ CSS that we have today. We can use it as a decorator to give new style and functionality to our custom (new) HTML element.
  • Custom elements – which can be looked as our toolbelt when we are coming to build a new web app and we wish to reuse ‘wheels’ and not reinvent them. We showed how to create new HTML elements by expanding HTML’s existing vocabulary.
  • Shadow DOM – It’s like the regular DOM you know (and love) but it’s down in the ‘shadows’ hidden from our eyes. It’s main goal is to give us encapsulations. It’s the glue that let us insert and work with our components. Think of a ‘tab’ component that you don’t need to ‘know’ about it’s style, functionality etc’. It will work for you and you can’t break it from your JS code because you forgot to use a namespace for your app logic.
  • Mutation Observers – and how to watch for changes in the DOM in the most efficient way. Continue reading
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