Looks like Google has jumped pretty hard behind Web Components—This video from Google I/O has a good overview. And check out some of the examples, including their library of "paper components," part of their “material design” initiative. Their fairly basic GUI editor shows examples of many of the existing polymer components.
The short of it: Instead of adding a bunch of divs with special ids and classes and then programming a bunch of javascript that runs on page load to fill those in with content based on results from an API, you use preconfigured, modular, and custom HTML tags to automatically hit APIs and render content. The big thing is that they provide a pattern on how to make your own components. And perhaps the even bigger thing is that they provide the pattern to have those be dynamically filled by APIs.
A lively lunch discussion came up around Behavioral Design Toolkits—Brains, Behavior and Design's offerings to help designers grasp and even visualize the basics of behavioral economics, as well as ways to design for the irrational mind.
Artefact Group's Behavior Change Strategy cards—built on the Behavioral Design Toolkit concepts to "help designers, researchers, and anyone facing a behavior change challenge, think through strategies to nudge people toward positive behavioral outcomes." You can download the cards from the site to try them out.
Speaking of behavior change, the New York Times had a good visual/data story on motorcycle helmet laws—Simple and clean text and graphs tell the sobering facts.