Polymer in Production / Part 2 - Building, bundling, lazy-loading

Continuing from my previous blog post about including web components and Polymer in a huge legacy web application, I want to focus on optimizing the performance of your web app using the Polymer CLI and at least the L part of the PRPL pattern in this post. There are several things you can do to improve the initial load time, even if your app doesn't follow the recommended app shell architecture.

Doing more with your Google Location History

With the discontinuation of the Google Latitude API several years ago some nice third party tools to visualize your location history disappeared, which at that time triggered me to look into what can be done with Google Takeout data. The result was the location_history_json_converter (or latitude_json_converter as it was called back then) which thanks to several contributions from the open source community has turned out to be a rather useful and powerful tool to prepare your takeout data for further manipulation and visualization.
Since I've recently used the tool myself again for a travel report (more about this below) and I never actively promoted or explained the tool, I've decided to put together this blog post to tell you about the tool and some samples of what can be done with it.

Polymer in Production

When I was tasked with including new functionality into an existing, rather big internal web application, I found myself in a bit of a dilemma.

For my own personal projects and several other internal projects I did at work, I have grown to love web-components using Polymer because of the ease of development and the natural way to structure applications into (re-usable) parts.

The existing web application in question had been mainly developed with a once (and still) very popular JavaScript library.

A full rewrite of the application was out of question due to time and budget restraints, but using Polymer would have a lot of benefits for the future as far as testability, maintainability and extensibility are concerned.

In this blog post I will go over some of the things I did and had to consider to make this work.

PolymerCubed

I've recently started using Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services for reporting purposes at work, and while querying the cubes worked great, the visualization options were rather unsatisfactory, especially when it came to building web-based dashboards.

And while there are several vendors offering solutions in this area, I decided to give it a try myself and started creating a suite of Polymer elements.

I/O 2016

I/O 2016 is over again already, so it's time to sum up my thoughts about what I/O brought for developers and what announcements/updates you should check out.

Polymer and the [hidden] attribute

The hidden attribute is a "fairly new" convenience attribute (fairly new = not implemented in IE<=10) to hide page elements that are not relevant in the current context/state of the website.

It is especially useful in a Polymer web app, since you can use attribute binding to show/hide elements based on (computed) properties, without having to make your own display: none; styles.

There are several cases where you will have to be careful with this attribute though.

Polymer on Blogger

I've had some fun over the past few weeks to force Polymer to work on Blogger, or rather to force Blogger to work with Polymer, and here are my results, some of which might be more useful than others.

A quick disclaimer before we get started:
This post definitely falls more into the "because I can" category than in the "because you should" category, and would need some extensive testing and tweaking before being used out in the wild.