Should I be developing on Service Portal or Next Experience UI? Am I wasting my time?

[Fuse Henry]

I became a Service Now developer a few months ago with only user-level SN experience. I did have years of experience developing web apps, with a pretty solid foundation of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but I have reached a point of complete confusion regarding Service Now development.

Service Now is a booming business, and I think it's a worthy endeavor to become an expert SN developer, but IMHO the SN documentation kinda sucks, if you can even find it, and regarding that; Why has so much documentation been moved, hidden, or taken down? I guess it's mass deprecation?

I'm also an SN admin, so I'm dividing my time between that and developing. I was able to figure out by experimentation how to create and/or modify forms. I discovered page editor/designer on my own and successfully completed my tasks, but now I've got a more complex task.

I've been assigned the job of building a new Service Portal. With the knowledge I was able to acquire from the interwebs, I was able to hack together a nice looking SP homepage, and I'm now getting started on the individual pages and forms. I feel under-the-gun on the development schedule so I decided to spend some decent coin purchasing Mark Miller's SN courses on Udemy, and buying some books on Kindle. I've been in these courses and books pretty much 7 days a week, and I'm learning Angular on the side. The courses have been been helpful, but slow-going, as I'm trying to get used to and understand the way SN is put together.

But now, I'm seeing all this promotion for the "Next Experience UI." So is that a replacement for Service Portal? I've read what SN docs said about it, and I'm still not clear. Can anyone out there give me a very clear, concise answer on this? Should I be diving in Next UI now? What do you think?

We're currently on Rome, but moving to Tokyo soon.

[Kristy Merriam]

I would say keep on going doing the Service Portal path. It isn't going anywhere any time soon. 

Once you're comfortable with SP, start dipping your toe into the Next Experience UI and UI Builder.

[Fuse Henry]

Thank you, I appreciate it. That's what I'm going to do.

Out of curiosity, can Next Experience and UI Builder replace the Service Portal completely? Also, are the same technologies leveraged? For example, HTML, JavaScript, Angular, etc. 

[Kristy Merriam]

At this point in time, no.

Completely different technologies at play in Next Experience. When you need some nice bedtime reading, check out the Developer site:

https://developer.servicenow.com/dev.do#!/reference/now-experience/tokyo/ui-framework/getting-starte...

[Brad Tilton]

Hello, I work on the Next Experience product team and would say it really depends on what your requirements are and the persona who will be using the experience.

• Requesters - If you need a requester portal where they'll be ordering catalog items, needing public or mobile access, or you need a pixel-perfect design, you should be using Service Portal.
• Fulfillers - If you need a tabbed workspace experience for folks who are resolving incidents, cases, etc., that is a good UIB use case. Currently, UIB cannot easily create responsive portals, there is limited catalog functionality, public pages are difficult to setup, and because of the theming engine it doesn't support pixel perfect design (you can't skin the experience to look exactly like your intranet portal).

There is an intermediate use case where you need a smaller, departmental type portal that doesn't use catalog or need to be responsive, and that is where either technology would work.

Service Portal is built on Angular 1 and bootstrap whereas the Next Experience UI Framework is a ServiceNow developed framework built on web component standards. The architecture is similar to React.