Getting Started with Apex

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What is Apex? 

Apex, a strongly typed, object-oriented programming language, empowers developers to execute flow and transaction control statements on the Salesforce servers in conjunction with calls to the API. It's a proprietary language developed by Salesforce, specifically designed to enable the creation of robust business logic within the Salesforce platform. With its syntactical similarity to Java, Apex serves as the backend code that can manipulate data in Salesforce, execute complex validation rules, and automate intricate business processes.

Critical features of Apex include:

Integration with Salesforce Data: Apex allows you to write complex queries and transactions against the data stored in Salesforce.

Transactional Control: Operations in Apex are transactional, meaning that all DML operations can be rolled back if any error occurs during the transaction process.

Governor Limits: Salesforce imposes runtime limits, known as governor limits, to ensure that runaway Apex codes or processes don't monopolize shared resources. Apex code must be written to work efficiently within these predefined limits.

Built-in Support for Testing: Salesforce requires a minimum of 75% code coverage for Apex code deployed to production environments, making testing an integral part of Apex development.

Trigger Framework: Apex can be triggered by data manipulation events (insert, update, delete, etc.), allowing code to be executed before and/or after such events occur.

Asynchronous Operations: Apex supports asynchronous operations through @future methods, batch Apex, Queueable Apex, and scheduled Apex. This allows processing in the background and handles long-running processes exceeding normal processing limits.

Versioned:  It is possible to save your Apex code with different versions of the API.

Web Services: Apex can expose web services and make callouts to external web services, enabling integration with external systems.

Apex is the backbone for backend processing in Salesforce. It is used to write custom logic that is too complex to be implemented using Salesforce's declarative options. It's also used to create triggers, classes, batch processes, and more to define the behavior of applications and automate processes in Salesforce.

How Does Apex Work?









Apex is compiled, stored, and run entirely on the Lightning Platform

All Apex code runs on-demand on the Lightning Platform. Developers write and save the code to the platform, and end users execute it via the user interface.

When a developer writes and saves Apex code on the platform, the platform's application server first compiles the code into an abstract set of instructions. These instructions are then saved as metadata, which can be understood by the Apex runtime interpreter.

When an end user triggers the execution of Apex, perhaps by clicking a button or accessing a Visualforce page, the platform's application server retrieves the compiled instructions from the metadata. It then sends them through the runtime interpreter before returning the result to the end user. The execution time for the end user is the same as for standard platform requests, so they won't notice any differences.

Developing Code in the Cloud

The Apex programming language is designed to operate in the cloud-based multitenant platform. It is specifically tailored for data access and manipulation on the platform and allows you to integrate custom business logic into system events. Although Apex offers several benefits for automating business processes on the platform, it is not a general-purpose programming language.

Please note that Apex has some limitations and cannot be utilized for the following purposes:

  • Render elements in the user interface other than error messages
  • Change standard functionality—Apex can only prevent the functionality from happening, or add additional functionality
  • Create temporary files
  • Spawn threads
Apex code runs on the Lightning Platform, which is a shared resource utilized by all organizations. To ensure consistent performance and scalability, Apex execution is bound by governor limits, guaranteeing that no single execution impacts the overall Salesforce service. As a result, all Apex codes are restricted by the number of operations (such as DML or SOQL) they can perform within a single process.

Every Apex request returns a collection of 1 to 50,000 records. You should not assume that your code will only work on one record simultaneously. Therefore, you must incorporate programming patterns that take bulk processing into account. Failing to do so may result in hitting the governor's limits.

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