As I've surveyed the successes and failures of ZF1 and ZF2, I've started considering how we can address usability: how do we make the framework more approachable? One concept I've been researching a ton lately is middleware. Middleware exists in a mature form in Ruby (via Rack), Python (via WSGI), and Node (via Connect / ExpressJS); just about every language has some exemplar. Even PHP has some ex