What is the difference between Polymer elements and AngularJS directives?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

On the Polymer Getting Started page, we see an example of Polymer in action:

  
    
    <script src="polymer-all/platform/platform.js">script>
    
     rel="import" href="x-foo.html">
  
  
    
    
  

What you will notice is  being defined by platform.js and x-foo.html.

It seems like this is the equivalent to a directive module in AngularJS:

angular.module('xfoo', [])
.controller('X-Foo', ['$scope',function($scope) {
    $scope.text = 'hey hey!';
})
.directive('x-foo', function() {
    return {
        restrict: 'EA',
        replace: true,
        controller: 'X-Foo',
        templateUrl: '/views/x-foo.html',
        link: function(scope, controller) {
        }
    };
});

• What is the difference between the two?

• What problems does Polymer solve that AngularJS has not or will not?

• Are there plans to tie Polymer in with AngularJS in the future?

manpreet 2 years ago

I think from a practical perspective, in the end the template feature of angular directives, and the web component methodology leveraged by polymer both accomplish the same task. The major differences as I can see it are that polymer leverages web APIs to include bits of HTML, a more syntactically correct, and simplistic way of achieving what Angular does programatically as it renders templates. Polymer is however as has been stated, a small framework for building declarative and interactive templates using components. It is made available for UI design purposes only, and is only supported in the most modern browsers. AngularJS is a complete MVC framework designed to make web applications declarative by use of data bindings, dependencies, and directives. They're two completely different animals. To your question, it seems to me at this point you'll get no major benefit from using polymer over angular, except having dozens of pre built components, however that would still require you to port those over to angular directives. In the future however, as the web APIs become more advanced, web components will completely remove the need to programatically define and build templates as the browser will be able to simply include them in a similar way to how it handles javascript or css files.