A brief history of triggers

Years before the introduction of Apex, the SOAP API was introduced to the Salesforce1 Platform. The SOAP API was a huge accomplishment and well received by customers. Finally, they could apply their external business logic to data stored on the Salesforce1 Platform. With the SOAP API, you can programmatically access all your data on the platform. You can perform queries, create, update, and delete records, and more. All of your business requirements and custom logic can be executed by calling into the Salesforce1 Platform. The calls are well documented and there are even toolkits for popular languages.

Once customers started taking advantage of the SOAP API, it wasn't long before they wanted more. Calling into the platform every hour to poll for new records and make updates is cumbersome. It also means that users sometimes have to wait an hour before their records are updated with information from outside systems. There had to be a way to initiate the process...