Middleware everywhere

I’m a huge fan of composition via middleware. Some people call them plugins, as we did back when I was working on Ubernote. We had plugins for all sorts of things. The only thing you need is a stable API and a default way of invoking things.

This turns out to be important later when considering how to do things in the Node/Express ecosystem. Express doubled down on plugins and I think it worked out pretty well. React has something now called Hooks which I think of in a similar way. It’s a way of plugging behavior into the page render flow without relying on fixed page lifecycle methods. Page lifecycles are a pain. It’s one of my worst memories of ASP.NET (viewstate, etc) and initially React had a similar pain with things like componentWillRender.

My current role involves a large Ruby codebase. I’m not as familiar with that ecosystem yet and I was reading some code that used an HTTP library called Faraday. Recently a co-worker was walking me through some code that used this library and I commented on having seen it and noted that it must be like requests or similar.

Well, it is, but it has some pretty neat features like… plugins! So we can do things like OAuth token refreshes in the client middleware. Pretty cool. Middleware everywhere.