Add first-class support for WebComponents (e.g. Blaze 2)

[brylie]

While Meteor 1.3+ is coming into alignment with new ECMAScript standard features and ecosystem, there is a similar opportunity for the Blaze 2 to align with web standards. The WebComponent APIs have similar style to current Blaze semantics, e.g. <template id=""> and lifecycle callbacks.

What are the plans for aligning Blaze 2 with the WebComponents?

Related

There are numerous discussions and efforts relating to WebComponents in Meteor. This section contains an overview of many related resources.

Feature and support requests

• meteor/blaze - Align Blaze 2 with Web Components APIs (2016) - please add your support, in the form of positive constructive comments, to this issue
• meteor/meteor - Align Blaze 2 with Web Components APIs (2016) (closed)
• Uncaught Error: Expected template or null, found: [object Object] (2015)
• Meteor & Polymer Data Binding
• webcomponents.js (Polymer) breaks events in meteor (2015)
• Feature Request: Allow extra template tag attributes and copy them to the template (2015) - related pull request
• Unable to pass arguments to data context method (2015)
• Blaze + Polymer (2014) - template events conflict when WebComponents are not kept in /public/
• Blaze, meteor’s templates, are not usable with polymer’s templates (2014)
• Meteor Web Component UI / Polymer (2014)
• HTML is probably defining a real <template> element (2012)

Forum discussions

• Packages vs. webcomponents vs. packages+webcomponents
• Meteor + webcomponents.js polyfill broken? (Jul. 2015)
• Polymer 1.0 paper-drawer-panel not rendering well with Blaze
• Polymer 1.0 icons not showing in Chrome, Blaze issue?
• Polymer 1.0 and iron router or flow router
• Using Polymer in Meteor?
• Meteor & Polymer Data Binding
• Polymer 1.0 with Meteor - pros and cons

@AndreasGalster

“The web is the framework”.

@awatson1978

Count me as another person in the web components camp… our Blaze code is well structured, and we’re hedging our bets with a preference towards webcomponents. Personally, I think it’s possible to thread the eye of the needle, and get webcomponents that are built using the Spacebars API, which runs on top of React, by way of a Sideburns replacement to Blaze

@tjmonsi

1. Blaze is still simple
2. Webcomponents is simpler

@jeffshaver

There is no reason for mdg to build blaze 2 just to try to one-up react/angular2
Just pull in react as the view (or webcomponents or whatever).

@markusgattol

I looked at react and find it good in the sense that it is an evolution in terms of having reusable components. In the end however I do think that one could (should?) go for webcompoenents (e.g. Polymer) right away because that’s the next evolutionary step after something like react anyway.

@awatson1978

I’d still be comfortable onramping junior developers, integrating designers and their design workflows, creating webcomponents using Blaze as per the W3C, and using most all of the latest/newest pure-javascript libraries. There would be one clear (and obvious) refactor path along a continuum towards pure javascript; and everything would fall nicely into place.

Q&A

• How i use web-components in MeteorJS?

Projects

Blaze + WebComponents

• Meteor Blaze Components - project with similar ambitions for componentization, not following WebComponents
• Meteor WebComponent

Polymer

• Meteor Polymer - initial work to bring WebComponent support based on Polymer library
• Meteor Polymer comeback - example app built with Polymer

Videos

• The complementarity of React and Web Components

Articles

• Polymer and MeteorJS, the Holy Grail of Web Development (2014)

[netmask]

I can confirm, from talks with Googlers, that the main framework of Google is not Angular, but WebComponents (well, not exactly a framework…).
Google is very generous to develop many things for us, one of them is Angular, but you can hardly find it in their products. You will not find it in Gmail, or any other strategic product of them.
The direction is WebComponents, and they encourage everybody to use it.
Contrary to other frameworks, WebComponent is natively supported by most browsers (e.g. Chrome), and Polymer allows it to run under the rest, too.

Their unofficial guidelines for developers who are uncertain which framework to use:

a. Use WebComponents.
b. DO NOT use features of Polymer that are not a part of WebComponents (Polymer is wider).
c. After you already work with WebComponents, if you want to support other browsers, use Polymer.

[aruntk]

Check out MWC SYNTHESIS

An attempt to replace blaze and templating with polymer.