Why and how does Polymer use Bower?, and do I NEED to learn to use Bower to use Polymer?
I was going through the Catalog of components, and all of them seem to have a 'Bower Command'.
Thanks for your help.
Edit: Bower is a package manager just as npm, I do understand that much. What I meant to ask is: It can be argued that npm has a wider user base than Bower some even argue that we should stop using bower altogether like here and here. So, how is it beneficial to Polymer the use of bower when there are other options. Is what Polymer does only achievable through bower?
Bower just like npm is a package manager. Here you can see the difference between the two.
No, you don't need to use bower to use Polymer, but without that you'll have to manually download each components that you need, place it at the location from where you can refer it and keep track of newer versions of each package that you have used.
In case you are creating custom elements to publish the situation get even worse as you'll have to pass a file along with your project listing all the dependency and the user will have to manually download each dependency listed in your project and then will have to make sure that he has all the dependencies that were required by your dependencies and so on.
This will make process of custom elements or modules in general very hard to use. That's why such projects use some package management tool.