What's new in Quebec for App Engine

[Charlie Steiner]

What’s new in Quebec for Creator Workflows – App Engine  

ServiceNow® App Engine and IntegrationHub together support ServiceNow’s fourth Workflow pillar called Creator Workflows. Creator Workflows deliver to organizations a strategic low-code platform for them to rapidly build and efficiently scale powerful business-critical applications that are optimized for the end-to-end user experience and knowledge worker productivity across multiple systems of records. 

App Engine Studio – A brand-new low-code developer experience 

Quebec is an extremely exciting release for App Engine. With this release, we are bringing to market a brand-new feature called App Engine Studio – an integrated low-code, guided development environment for citizen developers. 

Organizations are transforming their businesses to digital at an unprecedented speed. They need to build more digital apps but don’t have enough professional software developers to build them. 

App Engine Studio democratizes app dev for citizen developers to build new apps easily with low-code and guided templates. It abstracts away software development complexity so anyone can build new apps fast without professional software training or knowledge.

For existing ServiceNow developers, App Engine Studio further simplifies their app dev experience by consolidating and streamlining our previous varied studio experiences onto a single, intuitive, and holistic environment that supports the entire app dev lifecycle end-to-end. Our ServiceNow developers continue to work with the platform they are familiar with and love, now in a much more modern, and productive low-code environment. 

To further simplify the citizen dev experience, App Engine Studio ships with app and flow templates. These are extensible pre-built applications and workflows, so developers don’t have to start from scratch.

With App Engine Studio, better business and IT alignment becomes a reality. New apps can now be built by those closer to the business requirements, with faster iterations based on direct feedback. Apps naturally become more customer-centric. App Engine Studio smoothly facilitates the transition of the management and deployment of these apps to IT. With a single click, citizen developers can submit citizen apps to IT, who takes over and performs quality controls. They can run a health check and perform all of the guardrails necessary. This ensures that the citizen app is of high quality and conforms to their corporate standard before it’s released to production. 

App Engine Studio requires the Quebec release. It is released via the ServiceNow Store. This store-based release mechanism enables us to ship feature updates, such as new templates, on a more frequent basis. 

Flow Designer enhancements 

We have added improvements in Flow Designer around UI and UX to further elevate the overall process developer experience toward no and low-code. For example, you can add a Help tab and Guided Tours to your workflow for your process users. Color gradients are added to make workflow steps and logic clearer. And, this new experience is consistent across Flow Designer and App Engine Studio --- customers can go directly into this new Flow Designer experience or they can start from App Engine Studio, either way, they'll enjoy the same improved user experience. 

 

The next enhancement is out-of-the-box flow actions to get variables from a variable set and to generate record producers. Previously, to build a record producer on a service catalog, you would point it to a table that may have many, many fields. With the new record producer flow action, you can surface the necessary fields directly in Flow Designer, greatly simplifying the work required.  

Lastly, we continue to improve Flow Designer performance, usability, and security. Low latency asynchronous executions are now faster. As a security measure, Flow or action will not execute if not signed properly to avoid accidental changes. 

Pro developer enhancements 

We continue to invest in pro-developer productivity in Quebec, starting with Source Control. Previously, Source Control has supported global and scoped apps. In the Quebec release, we have expanded Source Control to support customizations for both Store and ServiceNow apps. 

 

The second feature is a new Script Tracer to help developers debug script issues. Script Tracer enables developers to understand the sequential flow of execution of scripts in each transaction, which helps them understand the business logic, resulting in better debugging of script issues.  

The last developer enhancement provides out-of-the-box integrations for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or (CI/CD) for Azure Pipelines, Jenkins, GitLab, and GitHub Actions. These add to our CI/CD capabilities via APIs introduced in our Orlando release, with supported templates for pipeline automation with respective CI/CD tooling. As a result, developers using our CI/CD APIs no longer need to build custom API wrappers from scratch. 

We can’t wait for you to leverage these powerful new features on your journey of digital innovation. 

Be sure to check out our other blogs: 

• IntegrationHub: Accelerate ServiceNow connectivity across any system 

• Now Platform®: Deliver digital workflows that connect people, functions, and systems 

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Join us for the The Now Platform Quebec event.

Register below to attend the Now Platform® Quebec release broadcast and hear about more capabilities to deliver cross-enterprise digital workflows that connect people, functions, and systems to accelerate innovation, increase agility and enhance productivity

Your event time will be automatically set based the country selected during registration.

AMS/EMEA: March 18 at 8 am PT/11 am ET/3 pm GMT
APJ: March 23 at 2 pm AEDT/12 pm JST KST

Register Now

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