Build apps fast or control app sprawl? YES!
The Vancouver family release updates for ServiceNow® App Engine are now available! Our Vancouver release innovations include our first foray into Gen AI, with text-to-code capabilities empowering developers to build apps fast and increase productivity! It also includes CICD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) enhancements so admins can leverage pre-existing deployment and test capabilities and empowers developers to interact with existing data more efficiently within their app environment. This allows us to strengthen our ability to enable customers to put “yes” to work.
Let’s look more closely at these new enhancements and subsequent capabilities!
Now Assist for Creator
App creation demands are growing by the week! With these demands, there is a constant push to find ways to develop apps faster and meet the pending skill gap by increasing developer productivity. With app development leaders being squeezed from two sides, Generative AI is an innovative technology that must be leveraged while managing its challenges like governance, security, and more.
With this Vancouver release, Now Assist for Creator offers a generative AI developer experience that improves development productivity by 30%1. This is enabled by text-to-code (i.e., comment to code, code completion) during app development along with case summarization, conventional experience, and content creation for users of the Gen AI apps that were created. Now, developers can write natural language comments, they were often trained to write as a best practice, to generate actual code suggestions that can be reviewed and accepted. This saves critical development time, while reducing syntax errors from manual typing and repetition during app development. Additionally, developers can start typing a line of code and quickly see code completion recommendations to further save manual typing, reduce syntax errors, and complete their app development faster!
Instance Scan and Automated Test Framework (ATF) Suites
App Engine administrators have spent time learning, writing, and testing test suites and app instances as part of their usual app development lifecycles. Over time, they have built best practice techniques into those processes during their unit and functional testing phases. However, they have had to repeat that work over and over to ensure new builds of their apps did not introduce any errors when they attempt production deployment.
With this Vancouver release, admins will be able to add any ATF suite or Instance Scans they previously created on their ‘testing’ instance to their production instance on the Scan Suites table! Any suite added there will run during the deployment just as out-of-the-box suites run today. Now users can leverage their tested best practices during production deployment! Avoiding rework and reducing the risk of introducing manual errors (e.g., syntax typos) during app deployment.
Scheduled Deployments
Time management is becoming harder with the growth of remote technology enabling us to get work done from virtually anywhere. For example, admins still struggle with waiting until developers upload their code, waiting for it to build, and then approving it for deployment. Most of the time this approval step occurs outside of normal work hours for 1st shift admins.
To help alleviate this challenge, when an app is ready to deploy to production, instead of seeing an ‘approval’ button, App Engine admins will see a ‘Deploy app’ button. This will open a modal and allow the user to choose to deploy now or deploy later. Just that flexibility in deployment timing alone saves admin time, reduces errors from having to rush through approvals after hours, and provides more deployment consistency across the CICD lifecycle.
Table Builder Enhancements
In addition to administrative enhancements, this release addresses challenges with the user experience for citizen developers. One such challenge is moving from builder to builder during app development, adjusting to different navigation placement, color patterns, and button types. A second challenge is building apps while being limited in how you can see the data tables usage and interconnectivity. There is a need to provide a holistic view of the application schema for enhanced visualization of how everything is connected.
In this release, end users, administrators, developers, and delegated developers can interact with an updated theme which will mirror the look and feel of the Now Platform. Developers benefit from improved guidance, and intuitive field creation experience, while in Table Builder. With this seamless theming and enhanced app development usability, users can transition between the Now Platform and App Engine Studio smoothly and develop higher quality applications with greater efficiency and accuracy.
Additionally, developer confusion is reduced by viewing the Schema of their table structure in a single view. That single view also loads more efficiently, regardless of its size! Now the developer can gather a holistic understanding of the structure of their data.
Workspace Builder usability enhancements
Faster load time is all about efficiency at all stages in app development. Finding the right category among a lengthy list of categories to apply to the app being built, in a console that appears slightly different than the ones you transitioned from, is a key time drain. Developers within Workspace Builder need an easier way to identify, understand, and navigate within their application.
So let me introduce this final Vancouver enhancement! Developers leveraging Workspace Builder can enjoy faster loading along with a common look and feel through consistent theming across the Now Platform, Table Builder, and Workspace Builder. Additionally, those long category lists are now optimized (i.e., grouped by category) and filtered for easy location and loading of the desired category. All these enhancements help drive developer efficiency within the App Engine development environment.
Want to learn more about the power of low-code apps? Check out our App Engine community forum.
- Ron Miller. “Harness releases generative AI assistant to help increase developer efficiency.” Tech Crunch. https://github.blog/2023-06-27-the-economic-impact-of-the-ai-powered-developer-lifecycle-and-lessons.... 8 September 2023.
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