We are trying to implement a UI development process that does not require the developer to have any understanding or interaction with ServiceNow. There are a number of advantages that we see to doing this. First, UI developers can use the tools they are familiar with and test/debug the application before ever deploying to ServiceNow. Second, we are able to minify and consolidate the html/javascript/css before writing to ServiceNow. This leads to a reduced number of server calls and bandwidth for end users on mobile devices when consuming the content, which we have noticed is a problem (even via desktop connections). It also allows us to use Git as Git is intended to be used. We are able to submit changes of individual files which can be version controlled, analyzed by automated tools, and then code reviewed before being merged to the appropriate branch and deployed to ServiceNow through Jenkins.
In the short time we have been using this process, it has worked well. There was even a CreatorCon session where someone else was doing the same thing using Grunt and NodeJS rather than Git and Jenkins. Porting HTML5 applications to ServiceNow.
However, although we want to deploy to our development environment using this methodology, we would like to follow a more standardized process when moving applications from environment to environment (dev->QA->production). We have verified that changes via the API do get saved to the application and the update set correctly. However we don't want to login and manually change those values each time we try to deploy to ServiceNow but rather make the changes via the REST API so it can be automated based on what is being deployed.
