ServiceNow Technologies/Languages

[markmmiller09]

Could someone point me in the right direction, or explain the technologies/languages used by ServiceNow? Specifically, the process of requesting, say a list of open incidents, in ServiceNow. At what steps in the process does Mozilla Rhino or Jelly come into play? Do the ServiceNow servers use Apache, Linux, MySQL? When does JavaScript get compiled and ran as Java code?

I come from a web development background, so I'm just curious as to what ServiceNow is using and how it works behind the scenes

[Inactive]

Mark,

A few resources to look into as you learn more about ServiceNow are the following:

1. ServiceNow Wiki
2. Foundations Course: ServiceNow Online Learning Courses
3. ServiceNow Guru: » ServiceNow Consulting Scripting Administration Development
4. ServiceNow Community

That being said, let me try and answer some of your questions. Feel free to ask more specific questions as they come up! That is what the community is for.

ServiceNow is Java based using a Tomcat Web Server running on Linux. The below image is a basic layout of the architecture of ServiceNow:

Within you ServiceNow instance you "program" or write code in the form of Business Rules, Client Scripts, UI Actions, UI Macros, and/or CMS pages. ServiceNow is built in such a way that, even if you don't know how to program, you can still do a lot. That being said, to utilize ServiceNow to its fullest potential, you would want to learn it.

When necessary, you will be writing Javascript code mixed with "Glide" elements. Here is an article from the Wiki that describes the Glide Stack:

Glide Stack - ServiceNow Wiki

Jelly is kind of weird, but pretty useful within ServiceNow. Basically it runs in 2 phases when rendering the page. Phase 1 is the static content and that gets cached. Phase 2 is more dynamic content and can contain server-side queries to get, say, a list of open incidents then display that list.

You can find some good videos by Chuck Tomasi here: Video Tutorials - ServiceNow Wiki (Go to the bottom, #8 TechNow)

[markmmiller09]

Awesome, thanks for the information Derek! I wonder why Jelly was used instead of JavaScript on the backend... I can't find many resources on Jelly

[Inactive]

It would seem, to me, that they expected Jelly to take off and be more popular than it has become. In any case, there aren't too many resources outside ServiceNow, nor much activity with it. Nevertheless, here is some good information about it from Apache:

Jelly - Jelly : Executable XML

[jesusemelendezm]

Derek,

Really nice explanation. One thing that I was curious about ServiceNow Technologies. I tried to look for gliderecord.class on internet and there is no information available apart from the ServiceNow Wiki. I am fascinated about this Java Class and how easily It translates query code on the SN instance into SQL queries to the MySQL database behind scenes. Is it sort of a ServiceNow Database query language created by ServiceNow engineers?