Book Image

ServiceNow: Building Powerful Workflows

By : Tim Woodruff, Martin Wood, Ashish Rudra Srivastava
Book Image

ServiceNow: Building Powerful Workflows

By: Tim Woodruff, Martin Wood, Ashish Rudra Srivastava

Overview of this book

ServiceNow is a SaaS application that provides workflow form-based applications. It is an ideal platform for creating enterprise-level applications, giving requesters and fulfillers improved visibility and access to a process. ServiceNow-based applications often replace email by providing a better way to get work done. This course will show you how to put important ServiceNow features to work in the real world. We will introduce key concepts and examples on managing and automating IT services, and help you build a solid foundation towards this new approach. You will then learn more about the power of tasks, events, and notifications. We’ll then focus on using web services and other mechanisms to integrate ServiceNow with other systems. Further on, you’ll learn how to secure applications and data, and understand how ServiceNow performs logging and error reporting. At the end of this course, you will acquire immediately applicable skills to rectify everyday problems encountered on the ServiceNow platform. The course provides you with highly practical content explaining ServiceNow from the following Packt books: 1. Learning ServiceNow 2. ServiceNow Cookbook 3. Mastering ServiceNow, Second Edition
Table of Contents (39 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Module 1
36
Bibliography

Building a modern interface


There are two parts to a web-based platform such as ServiceNow: the central server, which is where most of the data is stored, and the client browsers that ask for the data, display it, and then push information back to the server.

ServiceNow takes advantage of modern web browsers to provide a simple-to-use and feature-rich interface. This is built with JavaScript, the language of the Web. JavaScript is very capable, giving you control over the whole interaction with the user.

Note

Most ServiceNow system administrators have had some experience working with client-side JavaScript. So, writing scripts that interact with a web browser is often simple and familiar. The fact that ServiceNow also uses JavaScript on the server is a bonus: you only need to know one language.

The power and pitfalls of Ajax

Modern websites make heavy use of asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), a technique built by Microsoft but popularized by Google. It is the key method for loading data...