In this article, I am going to look at the possibility of composing asynchronous middleware in a similar way to Koa. All of the code can be transpiled by Babel using the presets for es2015 and stage-2 .

By now I am sure most people are up-to-date with the async specification for ES7. It allows for async defined functions to pause execution and await asynchronous calls to resolve before continuing. Very similar to ES6's generators in their ability to pause execution, however async/await functionality is built on the back of the ES6 Promise specification.

Koa, the spiritual successor to Express, has always used generators to create an interesting approach to middleware enacting on a given context. Koa@2 looks to move more towards async/await with version 3 looking to remove support for generators completely.

Composition

Having played around with functional programming more diligently for the last year or so, especially concerning functional composition, I was looking for some way of combining async/await with composition to be able to create middleware similar to Koa.

The following is the code that I came up with, it is in no way perfect, but it has proved workable in most instances. It allows for the combination of both async and synchronous middlewares, however it is best to make sure synchronous middleware appears as the last item.

Update: Thanks to @Tracker1, who's comment made a valuable point about not requiring the return of a Promise . This actually helped simplify the whole function and means we can remove the try/catch and only capture at the top level. This is the new updated function. Again, thanks @Tracker1 and I have absolutely no idea why your comment seems to be deleted.

const isNext = Symbol( 'isNext' ); const middlewareWithContext = (...mw) => async function (...args) { const nxt = args[args.length - 1 ][isNext] ? args.pop() : () => {}; await mw.reduceRight((next, curr) => async function () { next[isNext] = true ; await curr(...args.concat(next)) }, nxt)(); }

As you can see there is not much to it, but it does allow us to write some async middleware. For example, with a simple timeout helper, we can see how this works and begin to experiment. Click here to see an example of some simple middleware using the timeout helper running on the Babel REPL.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

Now lets look how we can expand on this to work with Node and its http module to produce something that works in a similar way to Koa, obviously without all the nicities involved with its plugins. We are going to be working with the raw Request and Response objects provided by Node's http module.

As we want a similar approach to Koa, we are going to save responses on the body property of the context, so the first thing we need to provide is a middleware that will resolve the body property and send it back to the requesting client. The other beauty of Koa's approach is the ability to capture errors high up the middleware stack, so lets also create a simple error handler middleware.

const resolve = async (ctx, next) => { await next(); ctx.res.end(ctx.body || '' ); }; const error = async (ctx, next) => { try { await next() } catch (e) { ctx.res.statusCode = 404 ; ctx.body = e.message; } };

OK, so now lets add a couple more middlewares for some simple routing. These are very basic as to show the approach that I took initially. For a more involved approach you can look at this gist which also attempts to mimic the Koa/Express API.

const onFoo = async (ctx, next) => { if (ctx.req.url === '/foo' ) { ctx.res.statusCode = 200 ; ctx.body = 'bar' ; } else { await next(); } }; const onBar = async (ctx, next) => { if (ctx.req.url === '/bar' ) { ctx.res.statusCode = 200 ; ctx.body = 'baz' ; } else { await next(); } }; const notFound = async () => { throw new Error ( 'Route not found!' ); };

Now using Node's http module and the middleware composer we wrote earlier, it's as simple as wiring the composed middleware into an http request handler.

import http from 'http' ; http.createServer((req, res) => middlewareWithContext(resolve, error, onFoo, onBar, notFound)({ req, res }) ).listen( 3000 );

And that is it. You should be able to see the results we expect by browsing to /foo or /bar on localhost:3000 . Any other route will return the error message from our notFound function.

There is a lot more that can be done with this. Have a look at this gist to see an approach which matches the Koa/Express API more. The file core would be the library, in this case with the name nomad (you can ignore that), where as index would be the normal kind of entry point you write for an application. It's not at all full-featured, but it was part of the experimentation to see how far I could take it. It also expands more on the "composition of compositions" that I touched on earlier.

Awaitable streams?

One other aspect of this I have been exprerimenting with is the possibility of using a similar approach for reactive streams. Instead of relying on a context, the next handler would be passed a value to execute the next "middleware" with (Yeah, it's not really middleware at this point). This essentially allows for the containing of a value over time using a very declarative approach.

If this is at all interesting to you, let me know. I would love to hear from you.