Web Development
Intermediate
What is Middleware?
Software that sits between the request and response in a web application, performing processing like authentication or logging.
Middleware functions form a pipeline that processes HTTP requests and responses. Each middleware can inspect, modify, or reject requests before passing them to the next handler. Common middleware handles authentication, CORS, compression, rate limiting, and logging.
In Express.js, middleware uses next() to pass control. In Laravel, middleware classes handle the request pipeline. The order of middleware execution matters — authentication should run before authorization, for example.