Building an MCP server — CCA-F Exam Prep

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L2.14|Building an MCP server
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Person
A developer at a whiteboard. On the board: a simple flow diagram. 'Client sends request' arrow to 'Server receives request' arrow to 'Server executes tool' arrow to 'Server returns result.' Below, a laptop with a terminal showing a working MCP server: 'MCP Server running on stdio. Tools registered: get_weather.' The developer is smiling. It's simple.

A developer built her first MCP server in 30 minutes. It had one tool: get_weather.

She'd spent two weeks reading MCP documentation, architecture diagrams, and protocol specs. It felt complicated. Transport layers. JSON-RPC. Capability negotiation. She kept putting off actually writing code.

Then she sat down and wrote it. Import the SDK. Create a server. Define a tool with a name, description, and parameters. Write the handler. Start the server. Done.

The minimal MCP server is about 40 lines. Most of it is the tool definition and handler. The protocol complexity is handled by the SDK.

The SDK handles the protocol. You handle the tools.