Polymer's Paper Elements & Angular Material

Question

Please help me understand the following quotes from the Angular Material github and home page:

This project is in early pre-release. Angular Material is both a reference implementation of Material Design and a complementary effort to the Polymer project's Paper Elements collection.

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The Angular Material Design project is a reference implementation effort similar to that provided in the Polymer project's Paper elements collection. This project provides a set of AngularJS UI elements that implement the material design system.

I understand that Polymer is a framework for web components, and that one piece of the project is the collection of paper elements. I do not understand how the two are related, or why Google is developing two strikingly similar, yet different projects.

• Is angular material simply a port of Paper Elements to angular?
• Are web developers to use Angular Material right alongside Paper Elements in their web apps?
• Are the two eventually going to effectively become equivalent? (Angular Material being used by AngularJS developers & Paper Elements used by others?)

Cyrie

Regarding "why Google is developing two strikingly similar, yet different projects" don't rule out the possibility that they're just different people, coming at things from different angles. Google is big, so not everything "they" do is actually part of a coordinated plan. – Wideopen

Answer 1

I think you should consider the fact that web components, polymer, material design, paper elements and angular are 5 distinct 'things'.

Web components is a group of 4 standards.

Polymer is a sugar syntax api on top of web components + some nice additional features.

Material Design is the latest style and interaction guide Google has announced and they are replicating more consistently across all their interfaces..web/mobile/etc.

Paper Elements are just an implementation of material design using Polymer. At the ChromeDev Summit Polymer team commented they plan to move paper elements into its own domain to avoid the confusion. Same things about the polyfills, these have been moved to webcomponents.org.

Angular is a library with a much wider scope than polymer.

Angular Material is just another implementation of material design using Angular.

My point being...material design will be reimplemented in as many flavors Google has to generate interfaces.

Google has a history of competing projects. But Angular's team has announced they will be using web components as well in their 2.0 version which is on the works right now. Will they use polymer to create directives? who knows? maybe..

Hershey

You could add Android L to the list as yet another implementation of this UI specification. – Coaction

Answer 2

From the recent ng-conf 2015 announcements it's clear that Angular 2.0 will have a new syntax and implementation to write Web Components spec based Custom Components (Directives).

Also, Angular-Material team has announced that post 1.0, they'll be porting it to Angular 2.0.

Hence, integration of Angular-Material and Polymer isn't in sight...Though, the good thing is that coz they're both based on Web Component Spec, they play well together, meaning that either can be used in an Angular App...

Excitability