My Top 21 Tools I Use For Developing Integrations

[jason_petty]

When working with customers on integrations, I have noticed that there are quite a few tools that I was taught about by both my trainer (John Andersen) and co-worker (Chris Maloy) that I use every day. I wanted to share the top 21 tools I use every day while working on integrations so that they may help others that do the same type of work I do. These are listed in order of most used.

1. Amazon EC2 (aws.amazon.com)
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   This is by far the most used tool since I work remotely. I use the ServiceNow integration into Amazon EC2 to spin up a test machine to develop and test an integration I am working on, then terminate it. Also, t1.micro size VMs are free for the first year after you sign up. You can also enable the Orchestration product in ServiceNow to facilitate spinning up instances to test with right from ServiceNow.

   
   
   
   
   
3. ServiceNow Wiki (wiki.servicenow.com)
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   Obviously a good place to look since all of our documentation is out there. Common integrations have wiki pages.

   
   
   
   
5. John Andersen's Blog (john-james-andersen.com)
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   This site has the best blog on ServiceNow integrations. John is one of the most knowledgeable people I know and a great writer. He has videos, example code, and screenshots throughout his blog posts of many integrations.

   
   
   
   
7. ServiceNow Community (community.servicenow.com)
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   There are so many good questions and solutions out there with everyone contributing. I frequently find how to do things for integrations out there.

   
   
   
   
9. Developer Community (developers.service-now.com)
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    This is a place where other consultants and developers can post their update sets and projects they are working on or at least some information about them and how they went about integrating with ServiceNow. You can also submit applications to get them certified.

    
    
    
    
11. SoapUI (www.soapui.org)
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    This is the BEST SOAP utility out there. I don't know what I would do without this tool. When working on any SOAP integration, you can use this to connect to your endpoint and send SOAP requests to it and test out your interface to any SOAP Web Service endpoint.

    
    
    
    
13. SAML Debugger (rnd.feide.no/software/saml_2_0_debugger)
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    I use this to decode and encode SAMLRequest and SAMLResponse encoded strings when working on a SAML integration

    
    
    
    
15. JavaScript Beautifier (jquery.org.cn/css/cssbeautify)
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    Great tool to format your javascript code and make it look nice. Ever get a big chuck of code from someone and want it nicely formatted and color coded so you can read it? Try this tool.

    
    
    
    
17. Text Diff (www.quickdiff.com)
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    Great easy to use text diff utility to compare code or any text.

    
    
    
    
19. XML Formatter (www.xmltoolbox.com)
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    This is a great utility to get that bunched up XML code and format it into a readable format.

    
    
    
    
21. Alfred (www.alfredapp.com)
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    This really isn't a utility that I use for integration work but I cannot live without it. One of my good friends, John Andersen, introduced me to this when I first started at ServiceNow and started using a Macbook. I use it for keyboard shortcuts and custom created queries that I can set up to make my computer do what I want with a few simple keystrokes. Awesome! This utility alone will be responsible for moving me from being a Windows guy to MacOS guy probably.

    
    
    
    
23. FileZilla (filezilla-project.org)
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    Use this to connect to FTP, FTPS, SFTP sites.

    
    
    
    
25. Tab Mix Plus (addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus)
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    This is a really useful tool when working on integrations. What this allows me to do is rename my browser tabs. For example, if I am working on an integration in ServiceNow and I want to have a tab open to the Data Sources, System Log, Background Scripts, Transform Map, etc, all from the same instance, I can open them all up then right-click on each tab and rename them to what I want. It makes it easy to remember what is in each tab.

    
    
    
    
27. Session Manager (addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/session-manager/?src=ss)
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    This utility goes along with the last one. When I am working on multiple customer instances and multiple integrations, I can open up all the tabs I want for one project, save that session, then open up tabs for my other project and save that session separately. I can then move back and forth between the two sessions. I can also come back to any session days later.

    
    
    
    
29. Firefox Web Developer and Chrome Developer Tools
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    These are great utilities to use to trace SAML logins and other things in the browser

    
    
    
    
31. RegExr Regular Expression Tool (gskinner.com/RegExr)
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    This is a great utility that I use to figure out what regular expression will select what text so I can use it in my code to parse through text.

    
    
    
    
33. VMWare Fusion (www.vmware.com)
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    This one doesn't need explaining really but you can spin up a virtual machine for testing and to use as anything like a MID Server.

    
    
    
    
35. Fryo.com (www.fryo.com)
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    Great website with all sorts of ServiceNow utilities like SSO Tools, String Utilities, and more.

    
    
    
    
37. Sublime (www.sublimetext.com)
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    Awesome text editing utility. If you want to quickly edit text files and do multiple lines, columns or entries at the same time, this is a great tool.

    
    
    
    
39. Afraid.org DNS (freedns.afraid.org)
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    You can have up to 5 free DNS entries. I use this to set my DNS for my Amazon instances.

    
    
    
    
41. ServiceNowGuru.com (www.servicenowguru.com)
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    This is an awesome site full of examples and resources to help you with integration type work in ServiceNow.