This tutorial will walk through the process and approach to using Google Polymer Web Components and Rails 5.1. Polymer is a lightweight library that helps you take full advantage of Web Components. Web Components combine HTML elements, CSS and Javascript into self-contained units.
With Web Components, you can create reusable custom elements that interoperate seamlessly with the browser’s built-in elements, or break your app up into right-sized components, making your code cleaner and less expensive to maintain.
For those new to Ruby on Rails, it provides a framework for building web-based applications. The framework is based on a Model-View-Controller architecture. The Web Components defined by the Google Polymer Project provide a great tool set for constructing the user interface portion of the Rails framework.
This tutorial is composed multiple snapshots of complete application versions. Each version will be a step toward adding more Polymer Web Components to it. The versions with corresponding tutorial steps will be stored in subdirectories of this repository. The tutorial steps include:
- Creation of a sample application and installing Polymer
- Addition of simple layout for header and navigation
- Addition of form elements for handling input
- Addition of an AJAX element