MCP Protocol

MCP Protocol

Model Context Protocol — server design, OAuth 2.1, transports, testing.

46Articles
46Topics covered
Articles in this category

All 33 articles, sorted alphabetically

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ARTICLE · 01

MCP authorization architecture

Deep-dive on MCP's authorization spec: protected-resource metadata discovery, dynamic client registration, PKCE consent flows, audience-bound acc…

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ARTICLE · 02

MCP request cancellation architecture

How cancellation works in the Model Context Protocol: the notifications/cancelled message and why it is fire-and-forget, the unavoidable race between …

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ARTICLE · 03

MCP capability negotiation architecture

Deep-dive on MCP capability negotiation: the initialize handshake where client and server exchange protocol versions and capabilities, the intersectio…

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ARTICLE · 04

MCP Client Architecture in Depth

A 2500-word walkthrough of MCP client architecture: session per server, capability merge, tool namespace, resource aggregator, approval UI, health, au…

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ARTICLE · 05

MCP Client and Server

The MCP role model in detail: why there are three roles and not two, what a host owns versus a client versus a server, the one-client-per-server relat…

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ARTICLE · 06

MCP completion -- argument autocompletion for tools and prompts

Deep-dive on the MCP completion capability: the argument-filling need, the server offering autocompletion suggestions, context-awareness, completion f…

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ARTICLE · 07

MCP elicitation

How MCP elicitation lets a server ask the user for input mid-operation: why a server cannot prompt directly, the schema that constrains what may be as…

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ARTICLE · 08

MCP error handling architecture

Deep-dive on Model Context Protocol error handling: the JSON-RPC code space, why tool failures ride inside successful results with isError, cancellati…

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ARTICLE · 09

MCP gateway architecture

Deep-dive on MCP gateways: merged policy-filtered catalogs, namespace mapping, OAuth token exchange per backend, session and notification fan-out, tra…

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ARTICLE · 10

MCP logging architecture

How MCP server logging works: the logging capability and logging/setLevel, the notifications/message shape with level, logger and data, the eight RFC …

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ARTICLE · 11

Multi-tenant MCP server architecture

Deep-dive on multi-tenancy for MCP servers: why isolation must live in the authenticated session rather than tool arguments, how identity flows from t…

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ARTICLE · 12

MCP Notifications: Fire-and-Forget Messaging in the Model Context Protocol

How MCP uses id-less JSON-RPC notifications for list-changed events, progress, resource updates, and cancellation — and the idempotent, backpressure-a…

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ARTICLE · 13

Model Context Protocol Overview

A map of the Model Context Protocol: the N x M integration problem it solves, what MCP is as an open JSON-RPC protocol, the host, client and server ro…

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ARTICLE · 14

MCP pagination architecture

Deep-dive on Model Context Protocol pagination: cursor-based paging for resources/tools/prompts lists, opaque nextCursor tokens, keyset vs offset resu…

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ARTICLE · 15

MCP progress architecture

How MCP reports progress on long-running operations: the progress token a client attaches to opt in, the fields a progress notification carries, why p…

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ARTICLE · 16

MCP prompts architecture

MCP prompts explained as the user-invoked primitive: prompts/list and prompts/get, declaring arguments, why a prompt returns a message sequence instea…

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ARTICLE · 17

MCP Protocol Details

How MCP messages actually look on the wire: JSON-RPC 2.0 as the substrate, the three message kinds, request IDs and correlation, the method namespace,…

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ARTICLE · 18

MCP rate limiting architecture

Deep-dive on rate limiting an MCP tool server: how a per-client, per-tool token bucket admits or rejects each call — weighting expensive tools more, a…

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ARTICLE · 19

MCP server registry -- discovering and managing servers

Deep-dive on MCP server registries: the manual-config scaling problem, the registry catalog, capability-based discovery, server metadata, publishing, …

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ARTICLE · 20

MCP resource subscriptions architecture

Deep-dive on MCP resource subscriptions: capability negotiation, resources/subscribe, the resources/updated notification, server-side subscription reg…

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ARTICLE · 21

MCP resources architecture

How MCP resources work: the application-controlled context primitive, why a resource is not a tool, URI addressing and URI templates, resources/list v…

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ARTICLE · 22

MCP roots architecture

How MCP roots work: the client declaring which URIs a server may operate on, the roots/list request and the list-changed notification, why a root is a…

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ARTICLE · 23

MCP sampling architecture

How MCP sampling inverts the usual call: an MCP server asks the host to run an LLM completion on its behalf. The request shape, model preferences as h…

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ARTICLE · 24

MCP Server Architecture in Depth

A 2500-word walkthrough of MCP server architecture: client, transport, capability negotiation, resources/tools/prompts, backend systems, and safety.

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ARTICLE · 25

MCP sessions -- stateful connections between client and server

Deep-dive on MCP sessions: the stateful client-server connection, initialization (handshake, version), capability negotiation (extensibility and compa…

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ARTICLE · 26

MCP structured tool output architecture

A focused guide to structured tool output in the Model Context Protocol: why prose-only tool results force the host to re-parse text and the model to …

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ARTICLE · 27

MCP tool annotations architecture

Deep-dive on MCP tool annotations: readOnlyHint, destructiveHint, idempotentHint, openWorldHint, and title; how clients turn them into auto-run/confir…

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ARTICLE · 28

MCP Tools Architecture in Depth

How MCP tools actually work: tools/list and tools/call, the tool definition of name, description and input schema, why the description is prompt surfa…

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ARTICLE · 29

MCP transport architecture

MCP transport as an abstraction: what the protocol requires of any wire (bidirectional messages, framing, ordering, correlation), why one JSON-RPC lay…

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ARTICLE · 30

MCP Transport Layer Deep-Dive: stdio vs. SSE for Remote Resources

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a powerful, standardized contract for how an AI agent invokes a tool.

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ARTICLE · 31

MCP streaming transport architecture

Deep-dive on MCP streaming transport: SSE frames, chunked deltas, progress events, backpressure, cancel, reconnect.

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ARTICLE · 32

MCP versioning architecture

Deep-dive on Model Context Protocol versioning: how the initialize handshake negotiates a shared protocol version, how capability flags let features e…

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ARTICLE · 33

Solving the "N x M" Integration Problem with MCP Servers and Clients

In modern enterprises, the AI landscape is exploding. A company may have N distinct AI models and agents—a summarization agent, a customer support chatbot, a data…

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