How Does Apex Work?
All Apex runs entirely on-demand on the Force.com platform, as shown in the following architecture diagram:
When
a developer writes and saves Apex code to the platform, the platform
application server first compiles the code into an abstract set of instructions
that can be understood by the Apex runtime interpreter, and then saves those
instructions as metadata.
When an end-user triggers the
execution of Apex, perhaps by clicking a button or accessing a Visualforce
page, the platform application server retrieves the compiled instructions from
the metadata and sends them through the runtime interpreter before returning
the result. The end-user observes no differences in execution time from
standard platform requests.
