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What's the difference between Polymer Starter Kit and Polymer App Toolbox?

Both are collections of web components, build & testing tools, and Material Design templates for building Progressive Web Apps with Polymer.

Which one should I base my new project on?

niutech
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2 Answers2

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Here are some details regarding both of them:

Toolbox

Pros:

  • Was built after Polymer team started focusing on app side of Polymer rather than elements
  • Gets more updates than PSK
  • Has all the other required tools (server, linter, bower, tester) built-in
  • In case of building an element (like to publish) it uses flat import structure, where even though bower downloads are kept in bower_components folder and element to be made is kept outside the bower_components folder imports are still made as though both are present in bower_components
  • Is made specifically to help developers in building their application/element
  • Is more in line with Progressive Web app vision of the team.

Cons:

Still in beta phase just like all the app-elements it uses internally

PSK

PSK was built with the purpose of providing a starting point for the developers who are new to Polymer and are more in learning phase. It has some pre-built elements with hard-coded data. If you look inside index.html you will find <template is="dom-bind"> being used which Polymer team recommends not to use in production environment. It was built when Polymer team was still focusing more on the elements side of Polymer as a result it does not use any of the Polymer's app-elements using which Polymer team has built the shop demo. A newer version has not been released since March as team is currently working on version 2 of PSK.

a1626
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  • Actually, PSK was last updated on [June 7, 2016](https://github.com/PolymerElements/polymer-starter-kit/commits/master) and the PSK2 branch is under [active development](https://github.com/PolymerElements/polymer-starter-kit/commits/psk2-polymer-build). – niutech Jul 11 '16 at 18:07
  • @niutech You are right. Actually the last release was in [March](https://github.com/PolymerElements/polymer-starter-kit/releases). I've made a correction in the answer and have also included the detail that you pointed out. – a1626 Jul 11 '16 at 18:53
  • The note about the Polymer team recommending "not to use [`dom-bind`] in production environment" is false. – tony19 Jul 12 '16 at 02:41
  • @tony19 I think it was in one of the `Polycasts` video where they said that here we are using `dom-bind` but in production always prefer creating a new element rather than using `dom-bind`. – a1626 Jul 12 '16 at 04:24
  • @a1626 Do you have a link to that Polycast or any official reference? There's no such warning in the [docs for `dom-bind`](https://www.polymer-project.org/1.0/docs/api/dom-bind), and I doubt it's actually true. – tony19 Jul 14 '16 at 01:36
  • @tony19 let me search for it, might take a little time though – a1626 Jul 15 '16 at 13:49
  • @a1626 Thanks. I'd like to get to the bottom of it :) – tony19 Jul 15 '16 at 13:50
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The official Polymer blog post Should I Use Polymer Starter Kit or Polymer CLI states that if you’re starting a new project, use Polymer CLI (which is a part of Polymer App Toolbox). In fact, the Polymer Starter Toolkit 2 is just another template that you can use with Polymer CLI:

Polymer CLI

niutech
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