The concept of middleware in software development often follows the Chain of Responsibility design pattern.

Middleware is a common pattern used in various types of software systems, such as web applications or message processing systems. It acts as a pipeline for processing requests or events, where each middleware component in the pipeline can either handle the request or pass it to the next component in the chain.

In the Chain of Responsibility pattern, a request is passed through a chain of potential handlers until one of them handles it. Similarly, in a middleware architecture, a request or event is passed through a series of middleware components, and each component has the opportunity to process or modify the request before passing it along to the next middleware component.