App (and I am using that term very loosely here) development has undergone a change. Most companies are eschewing high cost native development and for iOS and Android and going with hybrid solutions using tools like Xamarin or Ionic. This is a great way for organizations to lower their initial development and ongoing maintenance costs as well as get a useful app for their business needs. One area that many organizations are finding is that they still need desktop web applications and you don’t get the code sharing advantages between mobile and desktop platforms that you do between the two dominant mobile platforms – iOS and Android. Luckily, the march of development tools and frameworks has carried on and there’s a new solution – progressive web apps. These are web applications that live on the server but thanks to powerful JavaScript (or in some cases Typescript) can access native-like device capabilities. This, coupled with responsive development techniques and some adaptive CSS allows the app to scale in not only screen-size but also capabilities depending on the device. There are a number of frameworks that provide this, but my two favorites are Angular 4 and Polymer 2.
The Angular team now uses the tagline “one framework, mobile and desktop” and they mean it. Angular has come a long way from the original release of AngularJS and is now a full application development framework. Currently, Angular is on version four and if you’ve used an older version of the framework you’re going to find major differences (especially in the area of routing) but the time invested into catching up is well worth it. Using Angular 4 you can now create a high-functioning application that runs on everything from your twenty-seven inch desktop screen all the way down to a mobile phone. I do find that there’s a bit more ceremony in the latest versions of Angular than in the first, but you could argue that’s an advantage, since it also makes the framework more flexible than its predecessor.
Polymer 2 is more focused on JavaScript components than Angular but is no less powerful. While the details of it works under the hood are different the end result is exactly the same — you end up with a powerful application that can scale for different screen sizes and devices. If I had to make a comparison between Angular and Polymer 2, it would be that the Polymer team has made more of an effort to be “pure JavaScript.” I don’t love that criticism of Polymer for two reasons: 1) Angular is now written in Typescript and I (in my opinion) best consumed using Typescript and 2) some of the custom directives in Angular actually lead to less boilerplate than the more “pure JavaScript” alternatives in Polymer (especially around defining custom components), so I’d actually consider that a feature for Angular rather than a bug. Still, that doesn’t mean that Polymer is not a great choice for your progressive web app development needs.
There are of course other choices for developing progressive web apps but these two projects have the backing of Google and large communities around them, so they’re likely going to stand the test of time unlike the many <insert_noun.js> JavaScript frameworks of the previous ten years. The future looks bright for the progressive web app and by extension Angular and Polymer, given that the trend of businesses demanding more for less out of their developers and development partners is likely to continue.
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