If you are a Salesforce Developer, you know the drill:
- Develop
- Deploy
- Enable Debug Logs for a User or open Developer Console
- Test
- Something breaks -> inspect the Debug log
- Download the Debug log and use it with the Apex Log Replayer
For me, this always felt a bit icky. Why do I have to go through a full release cycle, interact with the org, and find and download the log to even get the most basic information about what happened in the backend?
And that's one of the keywords here. Something already happened. I created an error on the Org that I might even share with other people and developers. Let alone if it is a production org that faces this issue. Every fix I deploy will affect other people and needs to go through a full release cycle, just to check again retrospectively if it is fixed.
Apex again is the odd one out in the world of programming languages. Its historic strength to develop directly against the platform turns out to be a big time consumer on complex orgs.
Debugging at Runtime
Imagine for a second you are not a Salesforce developer, but you develop in Java, Go, Kotlin, Swift or any other widely used programming language. There is no Org, no server you deploy to, nothing that generates Debug Logs for you during your dev cycle to debug issues.
Instead, you can execute those languages on your machine. And because they execute on the machine, your IDE enables you to set breakpoints and inspect every single variable. All that without going through a release cycle to a Sandbox or a Scratch org. And all that without cluttering your machine with tons and tons of old debug logs that you forgot to delete.
If this is something you have dealt with in the past and would like to experience the same comfort as developers in other languages, having a look into Nimbus might be worth your time
Nimbus is a full local Apex Runtime and Debugger. It runs your Apex code against an embedded database as if you were on a Salesforce org, with the only difference that you don't need a Sandbox or a Scratch Org to verify what you have built
Set up Nimbus in less than a minute: https://github.com/nimbus-solution/nimbus and go Pro for free
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