Smarter Web Components: Making Polymer Communication-Aware
Authors: Michael Krug, Martin Gaedke
Introduction
The set of new W3C standards called Web Components brings reuse-oriented, component-based application development to the Web. By providing custom element names, encapsulation and interoperability, developers are able to create components that can be reused in any HTML5-based web application. Polymer is a framework by Google Inc. that utilizes the opportunities of Web Components. It hides the comprehensive set of technologies behind a declarative definition and adds additional features. Based on our recent research, we propose an extension to the Polymer framework to add event-based communication functionality to Web Components. We provide loosely coupling and support single as well as multi-device usage scenarios by adding a publish/subscribe message bus and multi-device synchronization. To showcase our approach, we present how to easily create reusable Web Components with Polymer that exploit our extended communication features to compose complex, cross-platform web applications.
Demo
An example application that is composed using several Web Components and uses the proposed extension of the Polymer framework to enable inter-component as well as inter-device communication can be explored visiting the following URL:
