Material UI, Google Polymer & Web Components

    Google introduced Material UI during the Google I/O a few days back. Since then the web is all abuzz with articles about material UI and what Polymer is and how these 2 fit together. In this article today, I will try and helps us all to get a better understanding of these new concepts.

    So, let's start with Material UI first. Google has for long been trying to bridge the gap between the Web and the Android worlds with a unified user interface and Google's Material UI is a big step towards this. The new design philosophy is about dynamically adjusting the elements according to screen size, add more white space between elements, provide a lot of user feedback using animations, make use of bold UI colors and be flat and 3D about the design at the same time. Now that sounds really cool, isn't it? Well, actually it is and you will actually appreciate and enjoy it all the more when you watch the following video from this year's Google I/O.

    Now let's shift our focus to Google Polymer. Google Polymer is not new and has been around for about more than a year now. Though it is still available as a developer-preview sort of a thing, it is being used to create applications. Polymer is a pioneering library that makes it faster and easier than ever before to build beautiful applications on the web. Polymer is built on top of a set of powerful new web platform primitives called the Web Components. Web Components has been around for quite some time now, after it had been conceptualized in 2010. This is a great article that you should definitely read to understand what web components are.

  

    Now, we have looked into Material UI, Google Polymer and Web Components. How does this all fit together? Polymer is the embodiment of material design for the web. The Polymer team works closely with the design teams behind material design. In fact, Polymer has played a key role in material design's development. It was used to quickly prototype and iterate on design concepts. Watch this next video where Eric Bidelman speaks about how web components are a complete game changer and how this revolution will make developers more productive and reduce the cognitive load of being a Web Developer.

    Till this point, we now have a clear understanding of the Material UI, Google Polymer and Web Components. Now let's get a brief overview of what components does Polymer offer the web developers. Watch this next video again from Google I/O 2014 by Rob Dodson.

    Hope you are all excited by now to try your hands at Google Polymer and embark on a new design jouney with Google's Material UI. I will soon be sharing sample codes on how to use the various components of Google Polymer - that means there is more fun on the way! Stay tuned!