PHP Developer interview questions

Best practices include using proper encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, leveraging interfaces and abstract classes, following SOLID principles, using namespaces, and organizing code into cohesive, reusable components.

Effective implementation involves separating concerns between Models, Views, and Controllers, establishing clear folder structures, ensuring controllers handle only business logic, using models for data manipulation, views for presentation, and integrating with a routing mechanism.

Strategies include using efficient SQL queries, implementing indexing, caching query results, using database connection pooling, avoiding N+1 query problems, and employing database sharding or replication when necessary.

PHP developers utilize design patterns such as Singleton, Factory, Strategy, Observer, and Dependency Injection to create flexible, testable, and maintainable code, especially in complex or scalable applications.

Advanced features include late static binding, traits, interfaces, abstract classes, type hinting, magic methods, and visibility modifiers (public, protected, private) for robust and extensible code.

Management involves using migration tools provided by frameworks such as Laravel’s Artisan or Phinx, organizing SQL scripts with versioning, and integrating database changes into the CI/CD pipeline to synchronize database schema across environments.

ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) simplifies data manipulation, reduces SQL boilerplate, enables secure parameter binding, and provides abstraction over database engines. Implementation is commonly done using tools like Doctrine or Eloquent in PHP applications.

Security is enhanced by using prepared statements, parameter binding, avoiding dynamic queries, employing ORM where possible, validating and sanitizing inputs, and adhering to the least privilege principle for database users.

Managing relationships involves using foreign keys for referential integrity, implementing proper normalization, utilizing transactions for atomic operations, and leveraging ORM relationship methods such as hasOne, hasMany, and belongsTo.

Considerations include using database abstraction layers, ensuring compatibility of SQL syntax, handling transactional consistency across databases, configuring unified error handling, and maintaining database drivers in the project’s dependencies.