Building an MCP Server
Hands-on guide to building a production-quality MCP filesystem server in Python using the official MCP SDK - complete with 4 tools, resources, MCP Inspector testing, and Claude Desktop integration.
Hands-on guide to building a production-quality MCP filesystem server in Python using the official MCP SDK - complete with 4 tools, resources, MCP Inspector testing, and Claude Desktop integration.
Deep dive into MCP's client-server architecture - Host, Client, and Server roles; stdio and HTTP+SSE transport layers; JSON-RPC 2.0 message format; initialization handshake; capability negotiation; and full lifecycle.
The growing MCP ecosystem - official Anthropic servers, community landscape, MCP registries, evaluating third-party servers, IDE integrations, and patterns for building ecosystem vs. team-specific servers.
Deep dive into MCP's three primitives - Tools (callable functions), Resources (readable data), and Prompts (reusable templates) - with complete Python implementations of each.
Deep architectural comparison of MCP and function calling - where each operates, when to use each, the decision matrix, hybrid patterns, and how to migrate from function calling to MCP.
A module map of the Model Context Protocol - from core concepts through architecture, primitives, building servers, security, ecosystem, and comparison with function calling.
Building LLM tool use systems in Python -- function calling, tool schemas, execution loops, error handling, and multi-step agent patterns.
The Model Context Protocol - announced by Anthropic in November 2024 - solves the N×M integration problem by giving AI systems a standard way to connect to any tool or data source.