On the Zend Developer Zone Matthew Weier O'Phinney has posted an announcement about the release of the first Release Candidate for Expressive, version 1.0.0RC1. It builds on top of the zend-stratigility component of the Zend Framework.

Today, we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of the first release candidate of Expressive, a [PSR-7](http://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-7/) [middleware](https://github.com/zendframework/zend-stratigility/blob/master/doc/book/middleware.md) microframework.

Expressive allows you to write PSR-7 middleware applications for the web. PSR-7 is a standard defining HTTP message interfaces; these are the incoming request and outgoing response for your application. By using PSR-7, we ensure that your applications will work in other PSR-7 contexts.

The post gives a brief introduction to the framework and lists some of its main features including:

• customizable routing choice (select from several packages, not just forced into one)
• implements the ContainerInterface for dependency injection handling
• allows for the integration of several types of templating tools (Plates, Twig, etc)
• customizable error handling (defaults to a template-based version)

He then walks you through getting started with the framework and creating a simple project. The setup prompts you and walks you through several choices of other packages to install (a router, a template library, etc) and hooks them all together. Once the installation is complete, all it takes is a simple web server start (PHP's own built-in works fine) and you'll have a fully functional application to work with. You can find out more information about the framework through the quickstart and full documentation.