Enlist the features of Phalcon

Phalcon is a high-performance PHP framework known for its speed and efficiency. When answering interview questions about Phalcon’s features, you could highlight the following:

1. Performance: Phalcon is designed for speed. It is implemented as a C-extension, which means it’s compiled into machine code and directly loaded into PHP’s memory, offering superior performance compared to frameworks written purely in PHP.
2. Low Overhead: Because Phalcon is written in C and loaded as a PHP extension, it has minimal overhead, resulting in faster execution times and lower resource usage.
3. Full Stack Framework: Phalcon is a full-stack framework, providing support for various aspects of web development, including MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, routing, caching, validation, ORM (Object-Relational Mapping), templating, and more.
4. Modular Structure: Phalcon is designed with a modular structure, allowing developers to use only the components they need, thus reducing unnecessary dependencies and keeping the application lightweight.
5. ORM (Object-Relational Mapping): Phalcon provides a powerful ORM called Phalcon\Mvc\Model, which simplifies database interactions by mapping database tables to PHP classes and vice versa, enabling developers to work with database records as objects.
6. Security: Phalcon comes with built-in security features to help developers prevent common web vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS (Cross-Site Scripting), CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery), and others.
7. Autoloading: Phalcon supports efficient autoloading of classes, which enhances performance by reducing the time spent on loading classes manually.
8. Caching: Phalcon provides support for caching mechanisms like file-based caching, memory caching, and more, allowing developers to optimize the performance of their applications by storing frequently accessed data in memory.
9. CLI (Command Line Interface) Tools: Phalcon offers a set of command-line tools to automate common tasks such as generating code, managing database migrations, and running tasks.
10. Internationalization and Localization: Phalcon includes features for internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n), making it easy to develop multilingual applications by providing mechanisms for translating text and formatting data based on different locales.

When answering an interview question about Phalcon’s features, it’s essential to provide a comprehensive overview while highlighting its key strengths and advantages over other PHP frameworks.