Polymer Starter Kit vs Polymer App Toolbox

Question

What's the difference between Polymer Starter Kit and Polymer App Toolbox?

Both are collections of web components, build & testing tools, and Material Design templates for building Progressive Web Apps with Polymer.

Which one should I base my new project on?

Nutshell

Answer 1

Here are some details regarding both of them:

Toolbox

Pros:

• Was built after Polymer team started focusing on app side of Polymer rather than elements
• Gets more updates than PSK
• Has all the other required tools (server, linter, bower, tester) built-in
• In case of building an element (like to publish) it uses flat import structure, where even though bower downloads are kept in bower_components folder and element to be made is kept outside the bower_components folder imports are still made as though both are present in bower_components
• Is made specifically to help developers in building their application/element
• Is more in line with Progressive Web app vision of the team.

Cons:

Still in beta phase just like all the app-elements it uses internally

PSK

PSK was built with the purpose of providing a starting point for the developers who are new to Polymer and are more in learning phase. It has some pre-built elements with hard-coded data. If you look inside index.html you will find <template is="dom-bind"> being used which Polymer team recommends not to use in production environment. It was built when Polymer team was still focusing more on the elements side of Polymer as a result it does not use any of the Polymer's app-elements using which Polymer team has built the shop demo. A newer version has not been released since March as team is currently working on version 2 of PSK.

Playback

Actually, PSK was last updated on June 7, 2016 and the PSK2 branch is under active development. – Nutshell

@Nutshell You are right. Actually the last release was in March. I've made a correction in the answer and have also included the detail that you pointed out. – Playback

The note about the Polymer team recommending "not to use [dom-bind] in production environment" is false. – Litalitany

@Litalitany I think it was in one of the Polycasts video where they said that here we are using dom-bind but in production always prefer creating a new element rather than using dom-bind. – Playback

@Playback Do you have a link to that Polycast or any official reference? There's no such warning in the docs for dom-bind, and I doubt it's actually true. – Litalitany

@Litalitany let me search for it, might take a little time though – Playback

@Playback Thanks. I'd like to get to the bottom of it :) – Litalitany

Answer 2

The official Polymer blog post Should I Use Polymer Starter Kit or Polymer CLI states that if you’re starting a new project, use Polymer CLI (which is a part of Polymer App Toolbox). In fact, the Polymer Starter Toolkit 2 is just another template that you can use with Polymer CLI:

Nutshell