Happy New Year from the Polymer team! Hope everyone had a nice break. We've all returned from our various travels and are getting ready to roll out some more web component goodness.

This week, we released a new preview of Polymer 3.0.

Here's what we'll cover today:

What is Polymer 3.0?

What's the status of the Polymer 3.0 project?

What's in the latest preview release?

What's coming next?

What is Polymer 3.0?

We announced Polymer 3.0 at Polymer Summit 2017. Polymer 3.0 repackages the Polymer 2.0 code with minimal API changes. What does change is the packaging and distribution:

JavaScript modules replace HTML imports.

npm replaces Bower.

For more details, you can see the original announcement: Polymer 3.0 preview: npm and ES6 Modules.

Polymer 3.0 is intended to be a purely mechanical upgrade, using the Polymer Modulizer tool. We're using this tool to convert the core library and our elements. You'll be able to use this tool to convert your elements, too.

Polymer 3.0 status and roadmap

Since we released the initial Polymer 3.0 preview, we've been working steadily towards a 3.0 release—but most of that progress has been invisible from the outside.

That's because most of our work has been on tools—improving Modulizer, and enhancing the other Polymer tools to handle 3.0. Meanwhile, the 3.0 preview branches haven't received any updates: these branches are generated code, so we're not merging any pull requests to them.

The project enters a new phase today. We're hoping to release 3.0 by the end of Q1, and until then we're aiming to make our progress more transparent. To that end, we're providing:

We still won't be taking any pull requests in the 3.x branches, however. Fixes should go into the appropriate master branch and/or to the Modulizer tool itself.

Read on to find out what's changed since preview 1.

What's in the latest 3.0 Preview?

The new versions of Polymer and the elements are available as version 3.0-pre.4 from npm (the @next version tag has also been updated to point to the new preview).

This version includes the latest changes from the Polymer master branch, including some important bug fixes and new features.

The latest version of Modulizer features better conversion, especially around test and demo paths. This is still an early preview for elements. Many more test suites are running and passing than in Preview 1, but there's still a lot of work to do on Modulizer to get even more to pass. Most elements work well enough for you to try them out.

The 3.0 preview release of the Polymer core library includes two new features:

PropertiesMixin . This mixin breaks out a small subset of the lower Polymer layers responsible for defining declarative properties, creating accessors, and syncing attributes to properties. Users of lit-html and other templating alternatives may find PropertiesMixin useful. It provides a single _propertiesChanged callback and can be used to create new, lightweight base classes. To illustrate, the following example shows a very simple element using PropertiesMixin : import {PropertiesMixin} from "../node_modules/@polymer/polymer/lib/mixins/properties-mixin.js" class MyPropertiesElement extends PropertiesMixin ( HTMLElement ) { static get properties() { return { name : String } _propertiesChanged(currentProps, changedProps, oldProps) { this .textContent = `Hello, ${ this .name} ` ; } } } } This is an intentionally simple example; we don't expect many people to use PropertiesMixin directly. It's intended to provide support for new base classes. For more information, see the source for PropertiesMixin . Documentation will be coming in a future release. If you're intersted in using lit-html , lit-element provides an experimental base class using PropertiesMixin with lit-html templating. lit-element repo

html tag function. Starting with this preview, you need to return an instance of HTMLTemplateElement from your element’s static template getter—the option to return a string has been removed. This change makes the template type predictable, which in turn will make it simpler to extend superclass templates. The easiest way to return an HTMLTemplateElement from your template getter is to use Polymer’s new html helper, which automatically generates an HTMLTemplateElement from a template literal string, as shown here: import {Element as PolymerElement, html} from "../node_modules/@polymer/polymer/polymer-element.js" class MyAppElement extends PolymerElement { static get template() { return html` < div > I'm a template </ div > < div > [[withBindings]] </ div > < button on-click = "clickHandler" > Click me! </ button > ` } ... } customElements.define( 'my-app-element' , MyAppElement);

In the interest of forward compatibility, these new features have been implemented in the Polymer 2 codebase and will also be included in the next 2.x release. As with any new features, keep in mind that they're subject to change until they land in an official release.

By the way, though you'll be able to use the html helper in your 2.x code if you want, you don't need to manually convert all of your string-based templates–Polymer Modulizer will do that for you when you convert to 3.0.

Other than these changes, APIs haven't changed, and you can follow the instructions in our previous blog post, Hands-on with the Polymer 3.0 preview.

So give the latest Polymer 3.0 preview a try. Send us feedback, report bugs, and let us know what you think!

What's coming next?

For an idea of what's coming down the pike, keep an eye on the roadmap and element status page.

As we said above, you can expect regular preview releases for the duration of the Polymer 3.0 project—look for the next one to land next week.

Based on feedback from early adopters of 3.0, we'll be focusing next on smoothing out some rough edges around package installation and module import specifiers. Watch this space for details!