Developing Web Components

Although web components are still on the bleeding edge—barely supported in modern browsers the technology is also moving extremely fast. This practical guide gets you up to speed on the concepts underlying W3C’s emerging standard and shows you how to build custom, reusable HTML5 Web Components.

Regardless of your experience with libraries such as jQuery and Polymer, this book teaches JavaScript developers the DOM manipulations these libraries perform. You’ll learn how to build a basic widget with vanilla JavaScript and then convert it into a web component that’s semantic, declarative, encapsulated, consumable, and maintainable. With custom components, the Web can finally fulfill its potential as a natively extensible application platform. 

This book gets you in at the right time.

• Understand core concepts (such as normal flow and positioning, and Z-index) for properly positioning, dragging, and resizing elements
• Explore UI concepts and patterns typically abstracted away by Dojo, jQuery UI, Kendo UI, and other libraries
• Dive into the W3C standard and convert your working widget example into a fully functioning web component
• Learn how to encapsulate, package, and deploy your web components with Google’s Polymer framework

About the Authors
Jarrod Overson has been developing on the web for over 15 years in both startups and global companies and currently works at Shape Security. He founded Gossamer to help bootstrap companies into developing for the modern web and has provided free community training on everything from node to backbone. Jarrod is an active proponent and contributor to open source, creator of Plato, and a member of the Grunt, Marionette, and ES-Analysis teams.

Jason Strimpel is a Staff Software Engineer on the platform team at WalmartLabs who specializes in the UI layer. Jason has been building web applications for the past 12 years. Approximately 3 years ago Jason began specializing in the front-end, in particular JavaScript. Since then Jason has worked with several component libraries and frameworks. However, Jason found limitations to these libraries when presented with uniquely challenging UI requirements, so he began developing his own custom components and catalog of helpers. He is an extremely passionate developer with a very bad sense of humor who loves simplifying the complexities that arise when building rich UIs.