Every developer should build a small 'web app' outside of servicenow

[ChrisF323949498]

What do you mean, outside of servicenow?

I mean, learn the skills required to build a website without leveraging all the great features servicenow gives us, however I would suggest it’s probably wise to utilise a library/framework to some degree.

Googling will reveal lots of tutorials, and depending on your skillset it will take a few hours to a few weeks to build.  

But why, what is the benefit, I work in servicenow?

Servicenow gives us an awesome platform to rapidly produce applications, but creating ‘from scratch’ gives a few other benefits.

1. It ensures you understand the fundamentals outside of just how to configure servicenow.
   For example, understanding how a webpage is requested, how the browser renders it, what a cookie is, what a header is, what event listeners are, what ‘queues’ the browser has, and how they work. All this extra knowledge can’t hurt, and fundamentally I believe we’re all ‘Web developers’ to varying degrees anyhow. I guess it’s taking a ‘First principals’ approach.
   
   
2. It increases your JavaScript knowledge – You’ll likely need to utilise a ‘fetch’ request to get data, or perhaps even learn about ‘closures’ in JavaScript. This increase in knowledge of JavaScript is beneficial when reviewing servicenow scripts.
   
   
3. You’ll appreciate how much of the heavy lifting servicenow does for us.
   UI Actions – An immediate button, in place for us – no DIVs, CSS, event listeners – it’s all handed for us.
   Callable script includes – We essentially have an endpoint we can call from the client side, easier than setting up a REST endpoint from scratch on a server.
   Security – Authentication is handled for us by servicenow, we can rate limit via configuration, configure ACLS without touching our Postgres(or other) database.

The benefits are vast!

So where to begin?

That’s a tricky question. My thoughts are, if you want to keep more closely aligned to servicenow, then building a ‘Todo list application’ in AngularJS (what the SN Portal uses) may give you the most ‘bang for buck’.
By doing that, you’ll upskill in Angular and building widgets in the portal will suddenly seem quite straight forward (at least once it ‘clicks’, as Angular is an extra ‘layer’ to understand).

However, if you’re more interested in created websites using more ‘modern’ libraries, then the ReactJS ecosystem is pretty vast and popular. As its popular, there are a lot of resources out there, and AI can help explain some concepts with reasonable accuracy.  However, the overlap between that are servicenow is perhaps slightly smaller than AngularJS mentioned previously (Although UI Builder changes this)

Or if you’re feeling brave, you could decide to not use a framework/library at all – just Raw HTML, and Event listeners, CSS, etc – This certainly gives us an appreciation for all the library's, but you will be reinventing the wheel so it’s a trade off.

As an aside, I’d probably avoid typescript and tailwind for now – Although typescript will set you up to learn fluent, it tend to add a layer of complexity that I find just confuses everyone and can be rather frustrating in the short-term.

But I would recommend building from scratch, at least something.

What have you been building outside of servicenow?

What did it teach you?

Do you echo my experience?

Resources that may help:

1. Probably the best Angular series I’ve ever seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO1ROKMjPqI
2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML
3. https://angularjs.org/

Happy Thursday!