[IceDane]

I would argue if you're trying to chain middleware or communicate between middleware, you're already holding it wrong. In basically every other framework you would have similar issues, in that there is no good, safe way to achieve what you're describing except persisting some data on an object and then hoping for the best. It's brittle, not type safe and just generally poor design.

With that said, I do agree that nextjs middleware is trash. My main issue with it is that I never use nextjs on vercel, always on node, but I'm still limited in what I can use in middleware because they're supposed to be edge-safe. Eye roll. They are apparently remedying this, but this sort of thing is typical for next.

[dminik]

I'm not sure I agree. Having multiple middlewares is a standard feature in many libraries/frameworks. Express (Node) has many middleware libraries to do a ton of stuff. Axum (in rust) also makes use of middlewares. You can argue that there's better way to do some of the things middlewares are used for, but then you're also arguing that literally everyone is holding it wrong.

I also don't think every other framework has the exact same issues. Take a look at SvelteKit for example.

You can add data from the middleware/hook into a locals object (https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/hooks#Server-hooks-locals). This is request scoped and accessible from the route handlers when needed. It also supports type definitions (https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/types#Locals). I wouldn't call this brittle. It's just dependency injection.

Note that it doesn't explicitly support multiple middlewares either (well, sort of; there's https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/faq#How-do-I-use-middleware but I think you're meant to be using hooks for your code https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/hooks#Server-hooks-handle), but at least it's easy to use and doesn't intentionally try to obfuscate information from you.

Edit: It seems that at some point sequence (https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/@sveltejs-kit-hooks#sequence) got added, so disregard the paragraph above.

[3np]

> I would argue if you're trying to chain middleware or communicate between middleware, you're already holding it wrong.

I haven't kept up with Next.js idioms but in generat that's what middleware is for. It's implied in the name. Middleware-chaining is a common idiom.

It's the littke details that Next.js middleware intercommunicate over HTTP headers (?!) that makes it a different pattern.

[pier25]

> It's brittle, not type safe and just generally poor design.

Dotnet has no problem with that when using Minimal APIs.

[ervine]

Watch out, Lee is gonna show up and defend this decision and not respond to any valid criticisms.

[DoesntMatter22]

I can't think of too many popular frameworks that DONT support multiple middleware. Yes you persist data through all the middleware if needed, that's the whole point