Today, we're launching the App Creator. It is to application development for enterprise IT what P90X was for the kid in gym class who couldn't bench press his age.
Many of us grew up in technology at a time when app-building was for graybeards schooled in the dark arts like Visual Basic, or for the less fortunate, COBOL and SQL. Back then, nothing came for free — views, table joins, reports. All extracted a portion of your soul as compensation. Blessed be the stolid few who, bare-knuckled, wrestled with currency conversions, date-time manipulation, or internationalization.
Gone are the days. Now, modern platforms do much of this for us. And a few do much more. The App Creator introduces a re-imagined app dev experience. We designed it to make heroes out of anyone tasked with building an app, owning the care and feeding of one, or managing a portfolio of them.
It doesn't make coffee or do the laundry but what it does it does well. Key features:
•Develop: make your app come to life without needing to hunt through the platform for features used by most apps. For example, modules and menu items are automatically created when you save your app, roles and ACLs are created, and tables can be auto-numbered with custom prefixes directly from the table editor within the App Creator. Personalizing layouts, defining UI policies, and adding workflows are all a click away.
•Manage: now, apps are first-class citizens on the platform. The App Creator associates all attributes — tables, modules, UI policies, etc. — with the new app container. A new app picker now exists alongside the Update Set picker to make sure all edits to the app go into the container.
•Publish: the container is useful for logically organizing the contents of apps but also for managing their lifecycle. When ready to promote an app from dev to test or prod, just assign a version and publish it. The app's serialized XML can then be retrieved from within any other instance just like an ordinary Update Set.
•Retire: the App Creator also makes it easy to remove apps from production. Since all app artifacts are now placed in a single container, whole apps and their data can be migrated or removed from instances without risk of leaving entrails behind.
I'm inspired by what I've already seen and the product's just launching. Three apps that stand out:
•One that manages student loan requests built in a coffee shop over lunch,
•Another that controls who can access high-security data centers,
•And a third that tracks fast food delivery customer complaints.
All are transforming processes relegated to email and spreadsheets into modern, web-based applications with workflow and analytics.
We set out to bring app dev out of the shadows. We set out to make it easier to build modern apps than to build tired spreadsheets. We set out to restore IT's focus on what creates business value.
So good news for graybeards everywhere. Come out of hiding. Join an army of fresh-faced millennials who can't spell printf and couldn't malloc to save their lives but are innovating circles around SharePoint and Lotus Notes.
Use the App Creator and let me know what you think. We've got a crack team at the ready to make it even better but we need to know what you like and where we can improve. Stop by the App Creator pod in the ServiceNow booth at Knowledge. We'll even help you build your first app.
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