Service Portal journey
Working with ServiceNow Service Portal on a daily basis I think I can tell a story…
Service Portal is a great framework which allows building custom web pages and portals. When you’re at the beginning of your journey, it provides you with a powerful tool to create UI pretty fast and easy enough.
But at some point, when you need to build something more than just a label/field/button… or you want to use tons of beautiful web components from all over the open source community — you may hit a wall. It might be either extremely complex or, in some cases, just impossible.
There are few things, which create a significant gap between Service Portal and modern web development:
- Service Portal is based on AngularJS — you’re locked with old and legacy framework
- Development environment — you have to stick to internal IDE and proprietary Service Portal API
- Application footprint — even a small Service Portal app includes multiple entities which are specific to ServiceNow only and have nothing to do with common web development (widget instances, containers/rows, etc.)
I believe it’s time to start adopting modern web technologies (React, Angular, Vue, etc.) in the ServiceNow platform. And hopefully, there will be more people in the development community advocating for that.
