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Choosing the right front-end technology is very crucial for building a good web application. CTOs want to use a framework that makes the development process easy and fast. There is always a big debate going on between Polymer and React frameworks, as both have their own sets of pros and cons.

Polymer and React are both very popular JavaScript frameworks for building intuitive web applications. But both have very different approaches and strengths when developing the frontend of websites and web apps.

This blog post will compare Polymer and React frameworks step-by-step on various important factors. It will help CTOs and technology leaders to understand both frameworks in great detail and make an informed decision to choose the right one for their needs and requirements.

Let us first understand what Polymer and React frameworks are all about.

Polymer is an open source JavaScript library that was created by Google developers and released in May 2013. It makes it easy to create reusable web components that can be used across different web applications. Polymer uses HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create custom elements that encapsulate markup and styles. The code written using Polymer is cross-browser compatible and works seamlessly across different browsers.

Polymer library was one of the sources of inspiration for Evan You when he was designing the popular Vue.js framework. Some key statistics related to usage of Polymer are:

  • As per SimilarTech survey, around 6150 websites across the world use Polymer JavaScript library. Out of these, 1652 websites using Polymer are based in the United States.
  • On GitHub, which is the world’s leading open source development platform, Polymer has about 57 repositories and it has received around 21.6k stars which highlights its popularity.

Some of the most common use cases where Polymer JavaScript library is used to develop web applications are:

  • Building single page web applications with smooth user experience
  • Creating progressive web applications having offline capabilities
  • Developing reusable UI components that can be shared across web projects
  • Building intuitive eCommerce websites and online stores
  • Developing hybrid mobile applications for Android and iOS
  • Creating real-time web applications with live updating data

Some of the most popular web apps built using Google’s Polymer library are:

  • YouTube leveraged Polymer’s web components to rebuild their mobile and desktop sites for better performance.
  • Google Maps APIs use Polymer’s elements and components to allow easy integration of Maps in other applications.
  • Google Earth redesigned its website and mobile application using Polymer and its web components.
  • McDonald’s used Polymer extensively for building the digital menu boards used in its 15,000 restaurant locations across the US.
  • USA Today used Polymer framework to help its development and design teams collaborate better for their website’s UI redesign project.

React is an open source JavaScript library that Facebook created for building intuitive user interfaces and web applications. React allows developers to create reusable UI components that encourage faster web development. Also, its efficient diff algorithm and ability to do one-way data binding allows quick rendering of web pages, which results in excellent user experience. All in all, React is a great library for building both lightweight as well as complex business web applications.

Some key statistics related to the adoption of React library are:

  • As per the 2018 State of Developer Ecosystem survey, around 60% of web developers use React JavaScript library for their projects.
  • React tops the list of “Most Loved Frameworks” on StackOverflow with almost 74% votes and it is the number one in the “Most Wanted Frameworks” list with around 21.5% votes.
  • It boasts of over 150,000 Github stars which highlights the strong developer community and continuously increasing adoption.

Some of the most common use cases where the React JavaScript library is used for building apps are:

  • Developing intuitive single-page web applications using React.js
  • Building video streaming platforms with smooth performance
  • Creating media and news websites with fast loading times
  • Developing user friendly SaaS products and dashboards
  • Building mobile applications using React Native
  • Creating desktop applications using React and Electron.js
  • Developing progressive web apps using React and Ionic framework
  • Building JAMstack websites using frameworks like Gatsby.js

Some of the most popular web apps built using Facebook’s React library are:

  • PayPal – The leading online payments platform used React.js to revamp its payment workflows, bookmarks and initial rendering for better user experience.
  • BBC – The renowned British Broadcasting Corporation’s BBC News channel used React to optimize its web portal for mobile-first experience leading to fast website performance.
  • Facebook – The social media giant’s Facebook Ads Manager application is built using React. Also, the main Facebook website and app consists of more than 20,000 React components.
  • Netflix – The popular video streaming service used React to fix performance bottlenecks and speed up initial load times to provide seamless user experience.
  • Twitter – The microblogging site rebuilt its frontend website architecture using React library to update content in real-time for smooth user experience. It also created a progressive web app version using React.

Now that we have understood what Polymer and React libraries are, let us look at some of the main pros and cons of both these popular JavaScript frameworks.

Pros of Polymer

Some of the major benefits and advantages of using Polymer are:

  • It provides the ability to create custom HTML elements which is very helpful for encapsulation and reusability.
  • Polymer allows one-way as well as two-way data binding between HTML elements on page. This enables seamless data communication between parent and child components.
  • Polymer has well-structured documentation which makes it easy for onboarding new developers into teams using Polymer.
  • It offers smooth integration with third-party JavaScript libraries like D3.js, Chart.js etc which is important for data visualization.
  • Polymer architecture uses native browser platform features when available instead of reinventing the wheel.
  • Polymer is designer friendly given its use of HTML and web components aligning with web development trends.
  • Since Polymer is open source, developers can easily contribute to it and create Polymer elements as per their requirements.

Cons of Polymer

Some of the major limitations and cons of using Polymer are:

  • Polymer’s web component architecture can be difficult to understand for some developers used to working with traditional JavaScript frameworks.
  • There is no clear documentation or guidelines provided for building large scale enterprise applications using Polymer framework.
  • Many users have reported performance issues when using Polymer to build mobile web applications and sites.

Pros of React

Some of the major benefits offered by React are:

  • React makes use of reusable UI components which avoids repetition of code and enables app development at scale.
  • React uses a virtual DOM algorithm to minimize expensive DOM operations. This results in apps that render efficiently even with large amounts of frequently updating data.
  • React promotes simpler and declarative style of programming which makes code more readable and maintainable.
  • Building complex single-page applications is easier with React given its component-driven architecture.
  • React updates UI in response to data changes in real-time instead of full page reloads leading to a great user experience.
  • Application state in React is maintained in specific components instead of disparate parts of code leading to predictable data flow.
  • React has a very thriving developer community with thousands of open-source libraries and tools.
  • React integrates well with the Flux architecture pattern which leads to stable software development.

Cons of React

Some of the major limitations of using React are:

  • Since React is just a library, developers need to consciously follow best practices to structure codebase of large applications.
  • There is no set way to organize React projects which requires some experience and discipline to handle app complexity.
  • Developers have to learn many third party packages like for routing and state management while working with React.
  • JSX syntax used in React can have a learning curve for developers used to traditional HTML and JavaScript.

Performance is one of the most important considerations while choosing a frontend web framework. Let us compare how Polymer and React fare on various performance parameters.

Polymer’s Performance

To improve the performance of apps built using Polymer, the library introduces lit-html and LitElement in Polymer 2.0 and higher versions. While lit-html is an extremely fast and lightweight HTML templating library, LitElement enables creating reusable web components with excellent performance.

Together these two libraries significantly improve the performance of web components developed using Polymer framework. At the Chrome Dev Summit 2016, Taylor Savage from Google discussed how Jumia Travel, the leading African travel booking website, leveraged Polymer to build high performance progressive web apps:

“Thanks to the Polymer App Toolbox and web components, Jumia built a progressive web app that has twice as fast a page load on 2G networks, and uses six times less data compared to their native app while delivering the same workflows and experience to users.”

React’s Performance

React uses a virtual DOM algorithm to minimize expensive operations to the real DOM which leads to excellent rendering performance. It compares the previous virtual DOM state with the new state and then updates only the UI components in real DOM that require changes. This avoids unnecessary re-rendering of the entire page if the underlying data changes.

This unique approach makes applications built using React very responsive and efficient even for complex UIs that have a lot of dynamically updating data. The reusable component architecture of React also results in better performance as code is not duplicated. For these reasons, React is widely used by leading tech giants to build high-performance web and mobile applications.

The kind of application architecture supported by a frontend framework is important for organization and scalability of codebase. Let’s see how Polymer and React differ in their architecture.

Polymer’s Application Architecture

Polymer does not dictate any specific architecture or project structure to developers. It provides the necessary APIs and tools to easily create reusable web components. So the primary focus of Polymer is to enable building modular components using emerging web standards.

Internally, Polymer is designed based on 4 layers that build on top of each other:

  • Native – This contains the standard features natively available in web browsers like Custom Elements and Shadow DOM.
  • Foundation – This layer provides cross-browser support through polyfills for features not available in all browsers like Mutation Observers.
  • Core – This layer gives the development environment and infrastructure to leverage features provided by lower layers.
  • Elements – This uppermost layer provides developers with readymade UI elements as building blocks for web apps.

This layered architecture enables creating reusable code modules that can be shared across multiple projects very easily just like LEGO blocks.

React’s Application Architecture

Unlike Polymer and traditional MVC frameworks, React does not have a built-in architecture pattern or project structure. In React, the user interface is built using a component-driven approach. These React components render the UI by transforming input data and state into a tree of UI elements that get rendered in the browser DOM.

So in React, the components actively monitor data changes and efficiently update the UI in response. This makes it seamless to build great user experiences without refreshing full pages.

For more complex real-world web applications with many dynamic elements, React relies on external state management libraries like Redux, Flux or MobX to implement the application architecture.

The ease of writing automated tests for apps is critical to ensure code quality and prevent bugs. Let’s see how Polymer and React frameworks compare on testability.

Testing Polymer Applications

The Polymer library comes with a well-integrated end-to-end testing environment called the Web Component Tester. This tester environment provides developers with similar capabilities as popular JavaScript testing tools like Mocha, Jasmine, Chai, Sinon etc.

This avoids the need to learn any new specialized tool for testing Polymer apps. At Polymer Summit 2015, Chris Joel explained the benefits of using the Web Component Tester:

“The Web Component Tester can drive multiple browsers using just a single command. Also, writing tests with it is straightforward as you simply create HTML files. The Polymer team has built great tools on top of it for an excellent testing experience.”

Testing React Applications

React offers test runners like Jest and provides integration with end-to-end testing tools like Cypress. These test runners help to run automated test suites that verify React components in real browser environments. This helps catch bugs and issues before deploying the app in production.

Overall, both Polymer and React provide good built-in support and integration options for writing automated tests for web applications.

The scalability of apps built using a framework is important for supporting increased traffic and complexity over time. Let’s see how scalable Polymer and React apps can be.

Polymer’s Scalability

Polymer uses emerging web standards like custom elements and shadow DOM to define self-contained components. This helps create reusable modules that can be scaled up or down easily without changing existing code.

Polymer also strives for cross-browser support so apps built using it can reach a wide audience. But Polymer’s reliance on browsers for rendering web components can impact performance and scalability for huge enterprise apps.

An example of Polymer’s scalability is YouTube’s migration to Polymer for their YouTube Gaming and YouTube TV progressive web apps. These sites built with Polymer handle millions of users everyday. At Polymer Summit 2017, a YouTube engineer shared:

“We have around 400 components custom built for YouTube using Polymer. And we have over 1000+ components across all our web properties. Polymer helped us standardize and share UI components easily leading to fast development.”

React’s Scalability

The virtual DOM architecture of React combined with its reusable component model makes it excellent for building web applications that can scale from thousands to millions of users. The efficient diffing algorithm built into React minimizes DOM operations even for complex UIs with a lot of dynamically updating data.

This results in optimal performance and response times even when activity on the app spikes during events like new product launches or holiday seasons.leading digital-first companies like Facebook, Netflix, Twitter use React to build their complex and high-traffic web applications.

Support for older browsers is important while choosing a web framework to maximize audience reach. Let’s examine browser support for Polymer and React.

Polymer’s Browser Support

A core focus of Polymer is providing support for web components across all major browsers. It uses polyfills to bring new web standards like shadow DOM and custom elements to browsers which don’t have native support.

This enables building apps with Polymer that can work on older browsers seamlessly. But the performance may vary across browsers depending on their level of support for standards used by Polymer.

React’s Browser Support

React is built keeping modern browser capabilities in mind. So it performs best on latest versions of popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox and Edge. For older browsers like Internet Explorer 11, React apps may require additional configuration like adding polyfills.

But even with additional configuration, React has better cross-browser support then Polymer. This makes React applications more accessible and compatible across a wide spectrum of browser versions and types.

An easy learning curve allows developers to gain proficiency rapidly in a new framework. Let’s see how easy it is to get started with Polymer and React.

Learning Polymer

Polymer is designed using standard web languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript that most developers are already familiar with. Polymer apps can be built using ES5 and ES6 JavaScript based on individual preferences.

This makes getting started with Polymer very easy even for beginners who only have basic JavaScript skills. At Polymer Summit 2016, a Comcast engineer spoke about onboarding new developers:

“We have onboarded many developers without prior Polymer experience to build apps like Xfinity Home. The excellent documentation and similarities with existing web skills make ramp up time very quick.”

Learning React

For developers who already have good experience with JavaScript, picking up React is also relatively straightforward. Many fundamental React concepts like components, props, state, and API callbacks adhere to common JavaScript conventions.

But for beginners, React’s JSX syntax and concepts like virtual DOM diffing may have a learning curve. Also, React code examples online often use the latest ES6+ JavaScript syntax which beginners might be unfamiliar with.

Overall, the learning curve for both Polymer and React is quite manageable with the right guidance. Between the two, Polymer has a slight edge for developers without extensive JavaScript experience.

The availability of skilled developers and engineers also drives technology choices to an extent. Let’s examine sourcing developers for Polymer and React.

Hiring Polymer Developers

Since Polymer is built using standard web development skills like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, front-end developers with this existing experience can be trained on Polymer fairly easily.

The average hourly rate for hiring Polymer developers ranges from $25 to $30 per hour. But the exact cost varies based on the years of experience the developer has in relevant areas.

Hiring React Developers

There is huge demand for React developers given its massive popularity among startups and enterprises. Developers with prior JavaScript expertise are likely to have worked with React previously or be interested in learning it.

The average hourly rate for hiring skilled React developers ranges between $34 to $40 based on experience level. The cost can go higher from $60 to $100 per hour for very senior React developers with 5-10 years of experience.

We have now done a thorough and detailed comparison between Polymer and React frameworks across all important criteria like performance, architecture, testing, scalability and learning curve.

Let us summarize some key pointers that CTOs and technology leaders should consider while choosing between Polymer and React:

In short, Polymer is a great choice for straightforward applications that use reusable UI components. And for complex business-critical web products, React provides more power and scalability. Weighing the key differences highlighted in this post will help CTOs pick the right front-end framework.

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