Before we help you with some top web components UI Libraries, you should know about what web components are. So, web components are the set of some technologies or the web platform API’s which are being used for creating some new customized HTML Tags that can be reused in the different web applications and web pages. It was a problem for web developers when they need to write the complex HTML Tags for rendering custom UI controls. This led them to write the same code multiple times which can make the web pages a big mess. That is when the web components came into existence and helped the web developers. For creating custom elements which can be reused again and have encapsulated functionality, the 3 main technologies of web components are used. The three main technologies are Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, and HTML templates.

Should you use web component libraries?

It becomes difficult for web developers to start writing web components from scratch. As writing the web components from scratch requires a lot of thinking and boilerplate code also. During such time, these libraries are helpful. As they help the web developers to create custom elements easily and also saves time. Especially, when you have to write many custom elements, in that case making use of a library will make your coding simple and efficient. Take for example the escort site Skip The Games, which presents local escorts sorted by country, state, and city. Custom elements are repeated on various pages and there are many pages. A library allows them to be implemented quickly and easily.

What to look for when choosing a web component library

When you plan to choose a web components library, there are a few things which you should check. Like whether the library has enough features or not that can cover all your cases. One needs to ensure that the web component present in the library should work simply just like the HTML element. So, do check this thing also, when choosing the web component library. Interoperability also matters, so check whether the implementation details are leaked by the library or not? A web developer should check all these things while choosing a web component library.

Some web component UI Libraries suggestions

Different web component UI Libraries are mentioned below. One can choose them by following the above-mentioned tips. Let’s know about these libraries.

Hybrid Library

This UI Library helps to create web components. This UI library makes it possible to create custom elements by providing functional and simple API. To define custom elements, pure functions and plain objects are used by the library. It helps in creating a flexible composition. Some of the features of the Hybrid Library are written below:

• As we just mentioned above, only pure functions and plain objects can be used.
• Have properties of merging and splitting and can also be reused easily.
• The recalculation takes place very fast. The mechanism of built-in-cache helps in securing the data flow and performance.
• It also includes tools for the developer. Like for the fast development, the support of hot module replacement is there.
• The template engine is created on the basis of tagged template literals.

Polymer Library

This web component library was created by Google. It includes the API with simple element creation. This library helps in building the reusable and encapsulated web components. These web components work simply like the standard HTML elements. They are being used in creating web applications. A web component that has been created with Polymer is easy and simple to use. One can easily use it just like using another HTML element and it can be imported easily in your projects. Polymer Library also provides a big selection of elements that are ready to use. These elements are arranged in 7 categories. One can easily migrate from the Polymer Library’s earlier or older version to the Polymer 3.0 version. As it is said to be more compatible and better with the JS(JavaScript) ecosystem. A good part about the Polymer Library was that it was capable of working with different types of browsers including some major ones like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE, and Edge. But now, the Polymer Library has got its successor and that is why it is recommended that if you have created or if you still have the applications based on the old Polymer Version, you should upgrade to the Polymer Library version 3.0. With the up-gradation in the Polymer Library to Polymer 3.0, it has become easy to work with different tools, different frameworks, and some popular libraries also.

Skate.js Library

It is said to be one of the lightweight libraries. The focus of this library is basically on the web components specs usage. It helps in providing a functional rendering pipeline. It uses 2 web component features which are very important. They are Custom elements and Shadow DOM. This web components library helps in the performant web components and functional web components. It writes these web components with a relatively smaller footprint in comparison with other web component libraries. Skate.js web component library is compatible with the cross framework. It easily works with the React and many other different frameworks. It complements these frameworks and provides a seamless workflow.

Slim.js

This is another web component library which is said to be a lightweight library. By making the use of es6 native class inheritance, this library helps in providing the web components with extended capabilities like data binding. The robust web components can be written without any unnecessary dependencies. The developers can take the help of this library for writing these web components easily and quickly. One need a polyfill for those browsers which do not support the slim.js web components library. The extra functionality can be written at any level without any difficulty like at the component level or the project level, etc. As the components of this library are unaware about the library to which the other components belong to or are written in, so this makes the delivery of the components easier with the help of the slim.js web component library.

A few other web component libraries which are popular these days are LitElement web component library, UI5 web component library, and Time Elements web component library.