React (React.js) vs. ServiceNow App Engine

React is a JavaScript user interface construction library that works well for:

• Developing web apps with dynamic and complicated user interfaces.
• creating reusable UI elements that may be used in other applications.
• creating single-page applications with dynamic content updates that don't require a page reload.
• The Virtual DOM's effective updating mechanism allows it to handle large volumes of data updates.

React, on the other hand, might be less suitable for:

• Websites that are simple, stagnant, and have no interaction. Other libraries or simple HTML, CSS, and JavaScript may be a better fit in such circumstances.
• Web sockets may be a better choice for applications that need real-time updates, such as chat or gaming apps.
• When creating mobile apps, React Native is a better option.
• Server side rendering only, as React is designed to run on the client side.

I suggest that people in ServiceNow start by building apps in App Engine through learning plans on the ServiceNow Developer site. It is a very guided process, and it is fun to do. Newcomers in ServiceNow can learn a lot about configuring tables, fields, behavior of fields, roles, Flows, UX, and many more. App Engine tends to make development work simpler and faster to ship. However, it can be a difficult concept for people new to ServiceNow to understand scoped applications. So there should be a brief on the App Engine homepage that mentions what can be built and includes a link to learn more about scoped apps.

Incentivized

• React is fantastic for building performant user interfaces. Our web app is snappy and great for our customers.
• React has the philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well which is the view layer of the application. This makes it incredibly intuitive and flexible for developers to use.
• React has lead the way in being able to write modular and structured code. It is a drastic improvement since the days of spaghetti jQuery code.
• React has an unmatched community. The amount of tools and libraries available is fantastic, and there plenty of solutions available online for common problems.

Incentivized

• App Engine can be used by non-developers to create Applications on the go, without coding.
• App Engine has all the important aspects of the application available for adding or editing within a single record. Hence, it is easier to modify.
• App Engine has a delegated development option which can be granted to specific developers or groups to manage a specific area for Scoped App Development without giving admin rights.

Incentivized

• Debugging React is challenging. Bugs in react code generate stack traces internal to React and it is often totally unclear how it relates to the code you actually wrote.
• Relating your React elements to corresponding DOM elements is difficult. The intentional separation of virtual and actual DOM also makes it difficult to map the elements to the structures in the DOM. This is partially ameliorated by the use of the React dev tool, which provides a DOM-like view of the React elements, but the tool still does not provide a direct correspondence with the DOM that is often necessary to figure out why something isn't right.
• Because JSX is React-specific and not a language feature, a special compilation process is necessary to convert JSX code to normal JS. Coming from a C++ background, compiling things doesn't bother me, but many JS developers are used to a less structured development.

Incentivized

• The scoped app prefix should be shorter to allow appropriate application naming if it exceeds the character limit. Either the scoped app name limit shall be increased, or the limit on scoped app prefixes shall be increased to allow better naming for scoped apps.
• It's challenging to make citizen development work at scale. Businesses want experienced pro code developers rather than citizen developers to work on this feature.

Incentivized

There are limited use cases where we are just using the service now app engine as of now

Incentivized

React is just a bit of a different animal. I was avoiding it for the longest time. I thought for sure I would land on Vue or something else with a more approachable and familiar appearance. But after taking an online course in React, I started realize what people were raving about (and complaining about) and decided to implement it at our office for one of our products.

Incentivized

Overall, very much usable for anything that happens in organisation. Able to track and discover each asset in the underlying infrastructure of the organisation and manage them. It is easy to understand the impact if any asset fails and hence risk mitigation becomes easier. It is a simple tool but with everything an organisation requires to go live with maximum customer impact and satisfaction

Incentivized

Almost 100% available on time

Incentivized

Since it's open-source and very popular, the community support for React and related tools and libraries is excellent. There are a lot of people using the same tools, and so issues tend to get fixed quickly and "recipes" are easy to come by. And since it's backed by Facebook, they have a dedicated engineering team working on the progression of React.

Incentivized

They tried their best to resolve our queries every time we contacted them about any technical support

Incentivized

App engine can be used just to process the minimal amount of the data which is being received from the user. We are service now catalogue items or any other data technology.

Incentivized

While this is a widely contested debate with various blog posts and benchmarks all over the place, its really a personal choice to determine what works for the team. Coming from a Angular 1.x background, I decided to try a new framework when Angular 2.x was announced and at that time React is gaining popularity and Vue hasn't taken off yet. Compared to Angular 1.x and Vue (hybrid of React and Angular) that split the logic from the html templates, I loved the way React breaks code into components using the jsx syntax. In my mind, this allows for cleaner components and easier maintenance

Incentivized

There were no options from the other products because ServiceNow App Engine is a large product with many different modules, growing each year, which allows you to recreate your business processes in a very short time, making the migration to ServiceNow very easy.

Incentivized

It is scalable but not reliable

Incentivized

• Our web applications now run much faster because the whole page doesn't reload
• We spend less time developing UI components because a lot of them are readily available on NPM
• We don't have to optimize apps for multiple browsers since React natively supports it.

Incentivized

• We have managed to close the un applied cash item from 56% to 89% in a given five working days period by using ServiceNow App Engine
• By automating and entire money laundering process, we have managed to provide the background check data as quickly as within a day, which was actually taking weeks Same reports when we were doing the things manually.

Incentivized