how to do a polymer app

[Tom Schreck]

Hello.  I'm very new to Polymer and have some questions on how to use it.  I've spent the past couple of days pouring over the documentation.  I'm excited about the potential that Polymer offers. 

So, it's my understanding that Polymer affords you the capability of creating custom webcomponents.  As such, I see it's possible to create something like the following:

<awesome-app>
         <page-home>
                  <tab-current>List of current stuff here...</tab-current>
                  <tab-recent>List of recent stuff here...</tab-recent>
                  <tab-history>List of historical stuff here...</tab-history>
         </page-home>

         <page-stuff-detail>
                   this is detail page for an item in the list of stuff on home page
         </page-stuff-detail>

         <page-product-catalog>
                   product listing here.....
         </page-product-catalog>

         <page-product-detail>
                   product detail here.....
         </page-product-detail>

         <page-shopping-cart>
               
         </page-shopping-cart>
</awesome-app>

So, my <awesome-app> is now a webcomponent that I can drop into any application.  It's self contained complete with capabilities to communicates with back-end server endpoints.

1. How does navigation (routes) work within <awesome-app>?
2. How will routes change the browser URL?
3. Back in the day, IE used to have XML Data Islands.  For some reason, this kind of reminds me of that.  I have a self contained island of functionality wrapped into a webcomponent I can drop into any HTML page.

Am I looking at this correctly?  Is the intent of Polymer to be able to create self contained components like this?

Thanks

Tom