The Salesforce development platform offers many powerful features to provide your team with apps that can unlock new workflows. For many years, the platform has run on a trifecta of technologies: Visualforce (to view the data), Apex (to handle the data), and Salesforce itself (to store the data).
Apex is like many other object-oriented languages, and it has a Java-like syntax. However, Apex runs directly on Salesforce servers, allowing developers to build and deploy an app without worrying about where to host it or how to secure their data.