How to develop Apex

To develop Apex, you can use different development tools—some of them are free, and for some, you need to pay. Now, you might be wondering which one of these is the best, or you might be wondering which one you should choose. The answer to this is that it depends on your personal taste and what kind of use you prefer. It can be Salesforce DX, admin plus developer tasks, a more visual interface, or a less command line.

The following is an overview of the different tools, which are used by 95% of Salesforce developers:

• Welkin Suite (https://welkinsuite.com): A Force.com IDE for administrator and developer tasks in Salesforce, which is based on Visual Studio. No additional software is required. A free trial is available.
• Illuminated Cloud (http://www.illuminatedcloud.com): A Force.com IDE for developers, where you can write the code and manage the full metadata. Installation of IntelliJ is required (the community Edition is free and fits the requirements to develop Apex). This plugin is paid.
• Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com): A free IDE based on Visual Studio of Microsoft, where you can add additional plugins for Salesforce (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?term=Salesforce&target=VSCode&category=All%20categories&sortBy=Relevance). From now, this is the only one that is supported by the Salesforce IDE.
• Developer Console: A free tool included in the Salesforce interface, where you can open the Developer Console by clicking on the Setup gear and clicking Developer Console. This is the one that we will be using throughout the book:

For the code examples in this book, we will use the Developer Console of Salesforce, but don't hesitate to use your own tools.