Welcome. In this book, I hope to teach you and enhance your ServiceNow scripting to ensure you can really be a scripting master. I will show when to configure and when to customize ServiceNow with scripts to achieve your goals. Building on the glide classes of ServiceNow, client- and server-side scripting will also be explored and explained.

Advancing through Jelly script and custom pages, this book also looks at debugging and best practices, rounding off with how to build your own custom applications.

Starting off in this first chapter, we look at when it is appropriate to script, and why scripting should be used, as well as configuring or customizing a ServiceNow instance. We will also explore the basic types of scripts in ServiceNow and when they are run. This chapter also covers the running order of ServiceNow scripts, a brief introduction to scripting, and the script editor used for scripting.

The topics we will cover in this chapter are:

• Configuration versus customization
• When to script in ServiceNow
• Script types
• Order of execution of scripts in ServiceNow
• Basics of scripting
• Script editor