With this post, I would like to start a series of articles about modern web development in ServiceNow — why we so desperately need it and how you can build ServiceNow applications with the most modern web technologies and frameworks.

Of course, the first question is always “Why?”

Why?

So why we should want to change things we already familiar with, like a common development approach in ServiceNow and Service Portal stuff.

That’s because we are developers. We want to grow as professionals, we want to create and share exciting stuff, we want to explore new things and technologies. And we want to make the ServiceNow platform better and our customers happy.

The following picture shows where we are today:

ServiceNow development community vs Web development community

This should give you an idea of how many technologies, tools, resources, and people are out there, beyond the ServiceNow universe. By some estimate, overall web development community (~14M developers) is 500 times bigger than current ServiceNow development community (~25K-40K).

And it’s not just about the people. It’s about new ideas, concepts, and paradigms in web development.

I don’t think that modern web development concepts have ever been promoted within the ServiceNow community, because when you say ‘web development’ to ServiceNow people, in 99% of the cases they hear ‘Service Portal’. And that’s OK. Service Portal does a great job.

But Service Portal is not the only and not always the best option.

I’ll try to show you something interesting — how to bring all those things from modern web development world into ServiceNow. And I hope this will encourage you to explore the topic further and it may change your perception of web development in ServiceNow forever.