On the Zend Framework blog Enrico Zimuel has posted a tutorial showing you how to use middleware caching in Zend Expressive to help increase the overall performance of your application.

Performance is one of the key feature for web application. Using a middleware architecture makes it very simple to implement a caching system in PHP.

The general idea is to store the response output of a URL in a file (or in memory, using memcached) and use it for subsequent requests. In this way we can bypass the execution of the previous middlewares starting from the second request.

Of course, this technique can only be applied for static contents, that does not require update for each HTTP request.

He shows how to implement the "cachable" middleware, starting with a version that caches the return content based on the URL requested. He then shows how to configure the caching system to specify settings like path, lifetime and the enabled/disabled state. This is stored as a PHP configuration where the autoloader can get to it and the class as a dependency on the middleware itself.