We've been planning the CreateNow Custom Application Hackathon for a while now and we've had time to really think about what we want to achieve from the contests.
We want to allow our customers, partners and prospects to show their talents by building creative applications on the platform. We also wanted our platform to shine through and to show how easy it is to build custom applications.
I set a challenge to Polly, an intern on my development team back in London. Could she build me a judging application to help us score the CreateNow contests? We'd use the application to capture and record the results of the Hackathon and quickly determine a winner.
Polly has only been with ServiceNow for a few months - she isn't a hardened ServiceNow developer that can churn out a new application in a few minutes.. but she was able to build something really impressive in a short amount of time.
ServiceNow provided all of the components she needed. She built new data models for "City", "Team" and "Criteria" and the platform laid out the lists, forms and reports that she would need.
She reused components from the platform for security, user authentication and access control so only authorised judges could mark the teams.
The Script Include which generates the scores was written in Javascript - a simple method of expressing complex business logic thats accessible enough for most IT programmers to understand.
With the data models, forms to collect data and the business logic written Polly had a functional application. To go the extra mile she also wrote a custom User Interface to make the experience quicker and easier for the judges.
I'm pretty proud of the Judging application that Polly wrote, and I'm really looking forward to seeing more examples of creativity and application building in the CreateNow event in Paris today.
You can follow the Hackathon competition during the day on the Google+ community or on Twitter - I'll be blogging again once the Paris competition is done.. next stop Mainz, Germany!.
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