What are some best practices for creating a web interface in PHP that interacts with a database?

When creating a web interface in PHP that interacts with a database, it is important to follow best practices to ensure security, performance, and maintainability. One key practice is to use prepared statements to prevent SQL injection attacks. Additionally, it is recommended to sanitize user input to prevent cross-site scripting attacks. Finally, consider using an ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) library to simplify database interactions and improve code readability. 

// Connect to the database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database";
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// Use prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $conn->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ?");
$stmt->bind_param("s", $username);
$stmt->execute();
$result = $stmt->get_result();
while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    // Process the results
}

// Sanitize user input to prevent cross-site scripting
$username = htmlspecialchars($_POST['username']);

// Use an ORM library for database interactions
// Example using Eloquent ORM
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Illuminate\Database\Capsule\Manager as Capsule;

$capsule = new Capsule;
$capsule->addConnection([
    'driver'    => 'mysql',
    'host'      => 'localhost',
    'database'  => 'database',
    'username'  => 'username',
    'password'  => 'password',
    'charset'   => 'utf8',
    'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
    'prefix'    => '',
]);
$capsule->setAsGlobal();
$capsule->bootEloquent();

// Now you can interact with the database using Eloquent models
$user = User::where('username', $username)->first();

Keywords

SQL injection PDO prepared statements MVC architecture data validation

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