Developing Web Components, UI from JQuery to Polymer
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It's hard to find sources how to do front-end micro-services in a single page application (SPA). Having a single front-end that faces the user makes it hard to impossible to exploid the full power of going micro-services in the back-end. For every new function you cannot just deploy the corresponding service, but you have the dependency to update and redeploy the service as well.
So I was looking around how to go micro in an SPA. One of the ideas I found on the web was to do so using web components. To evaluate this idea as someone working mainly on the backend I thought I should get some literature and bought the book Developing Web Components by Jarrod Overson and Jason Strimpel, O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2015.
What did I get from the book?
The end-to-end theme of the book is to develop a dialog box web component. As a familar entry to the component it starts doing so in JQuery. Afterwards the component gets ported to using plain HTML5 APIs (templates, shadow DOM, custom elements, and imports). In the last part of the book, it gets converted to using Polymer. This makes the implementation much cleaner and easier to do.
As I don't do much front-end development it was very interesting to see what is
possible in modern browsers by now. I like how web components bring back some of
the strengts of HTML: marking the structure and semantics of a text instead of
building interfaces by just styling a bunch of <div/>s. I
like to see hightly semantic pages on the web. But I see so many web developers
only taking care of the visual impression in a browser. Therefore it's always a
requirement, that the way to get there also results in the work being done
easier. The ease of using components built with polymer may achieve this goal.
But pertaining to my initial motivation to read the book, I have to say, that I didn't find a good match for doing micro-services in using web components.
