You might not be old enough to remember this, but before the AI hype, ServiceNow was all about low-code / no-code.

Writing actual code was heavily discouraged.

This attracted non-technical people to the ecosystem and drove platform growth, which is great.

But it also scared away developers who love coding: there’s no room for you here!

And even if you ignored that message, you had to live with this sensation that you are adding niche or legacy technologies to your CV that won’t help if you leave the ServiceNow world (Did you know that AngularJS joined the Google graveyard in 2021, and ServiceNow is maintaining its own version?).

Luckily, things are changing with the new ServiceNow IDE and SDK, and I’m really curious where that leads.

But there’s another way! Andrew’s way!

When Roberto and I were talking about modern web development in ServiceNow back in the day, Andrew Pishchulin’s Medium articles were the best reference on the topic. Not only technically, but as validation that we weren’t (completely) insane when we founded SwissFlowIt and started building Documate.

We built a similar set-up to Andrew‘s to develop, deploy and execute our apps (and by “we”, I mean Roberto did all the hard work!).

Key takeaways

Starting with why

Why do we care about modern web development in ServiceNow?

The ServiceNow ecosystem, while powerful, is relatively small compared to the broader software development world.

Modern web frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, and Svelte expand what’s possible within ServiceNow. You inherit the platform’s security model automatically.

Standing on the shoulder of giants¹

With modern web development, you can build user interfaces and experiences that would be difficult or impossible to replicate with out-of-the-box ServiceNow technologies.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel or learn ServiceNow niche features. There are plenty of open source frameworks and libraries that you can use as if they were Lego pieces to build amazing enterprise products.

Simple technical architecture

Three simple steps:

Build locally in your favourite IDE and compile into a single HTML file.
Deploy the app in ServiceNow in a single System property [sys_property].
Serve the file to the user via REST API.

Accessing ServiceNow data and security

Your web application communicates with ServiceNow through REST API calls. For development, you can use username/password authentication and for production, use session tokens.

This approach is identical to how ServiceNow’s own workspaces function, making REST API calls to retrieve and update data.

And remember that no code is running on the server. The server only serves the app and the data to the client, respecting the security settings in the instance.

Examples

Andrew showcases some impressive examples, including AI integrations leveraging ServiceNow data:

Spreadsheets
AI chat
Voice AI agent

Closing remarks

Not everything needs React. UI Builder and Now Experience Framework work well for standard use cases.

Watch this nullEDGE session, play with the ServiceNow React App boilerplate in GitHub and see where it takes you.

Disclaimer: It might lead you to question your current job and start a partnership with ServiceNow to build modern web apps.