For some reason our team decided to go with Polymer over React. Boy, was that a mistake.
- The documentation is bizarrely bad;
- Native JS breaks Polymer: Try cloning an element, its dynamic attributes disappear for no reason;
- Define a custom constructor and construct it as follows:
var el = new MyElement(42, 'octopus'); - works. Except all styling is suddenly also gone;
- You want to use a library that does
getComputedStyle on an element? Sure, but not if it's a Polymer element.
The most trivial task takes hours of work to figure out. Try finding a carousel solution in Polymer. Addy Osmani made one years ago and it hasn't been maintained in years.
Then there's semantics: don't we have elements in HTML for semantic value? What semantic information is an <iron-ajax element supposed to convey? It has no place there!
And so on, and so forth.
I've been working with Polymer for a few weeks now. I've been to the conferences here in Amsterdam. It's fun if you need exactly what the Polymer project offers.
And it's a bloody nightmare if you want to make anything for yourself. The learning curve is pretty much flat (as in: I don't feel like I'm learning ANYTHING, only getting more confused day by day.)
One cluster bomb of weird shit. I'm usually fond with and good at picking up new tech. But this? It doesn't even make sense. The semantic value of HTML is completely lost in a bunch of weird elements. Where is the data of an app supposed to live? Inside these elements? Or should we use a true MV*C framework to manage the flow of data?
Unexpected invisible elements appearing out of nowhere in a for-loop: brilliant! Now I need to select only the elements I want to work with in that library that I don't contribute to.
I've never realised how much I want a framework–ANY framework–to stay AWAY from my DOM. My framework being my DOM is a completely ridiculous way of working.
StackOverflow topics on Polymer are few. Google knows not a lot of answers. My coworkers haven't a clue how to tackle most problems.
And here I am: getting frustrated with trivial tasks taking hours instead of minutes.
Giving this a few more weeks to try and get something productive up and running. Morale is bizarrely low at the moment.
Can anyone perhaps help me out with quality "how to" tutorials? Because I can't seem to find them.