Deciding to write code

There are very often two way to do things in ServiceNow - point and click, or code. It's a good idea to use the point and click mechanism - it is often highly optimized, portable, maintainable, and upgradable. This book will look at many of these options, and guide you towards using them when possible. But sometimes you need total control. To be a ServiceNow master, you need to write scripts.

ServiceNow has hundreds of places where you can write code. Aside from a very few exceptions, JavaScript is used in all instances. JavaScript is a very flexible and powerful language and is most commonly known for its inclusion in almost every web browser. This has made it almost mandatory for web development these days, with its simple syntax allowing many people to quickly add simple logic to web pages with minimum effort. Taking advantage of this familiarity, ServiceNow uses JavaScript both on the server and client sides.

Using the developer community

Like most platforms, ServiceNow provides a variety of documentation sources. In addition to the product documentation (available at http://docs.servicenow.com), ServiceNow also runs the ServiceNow Developer Program, at http://developer.servicenow.com. This provides a wealth of useful documentation, including tutorials and self-paced training. You may have already used the Developer Program to get a free instance.

Especially useful is the API documentation. These next few chapters will explore the most important capabilities of the ServiceNow platform, but it isn't possible to be totally comprehensive. Dive into the API docs to obtain more examples and insight: https://developer.servicenow.com/app.do#!/api_doc?v=helsinki.