Building Your First Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server with TypeScript and Zod

Short summary

A comprehensive guide to building a production-grade Model Context Protocol (MCP) server using TypeScript, the official @modelcontextprotocol/sdk, and Zod for runtime validation. MCP, developed by Anthropic, provides an open standard for connecting AI models to external data sources and tools, replacing brittle ad-hoc integration layers. The article maps MCP's client-server architecture to microservices patterns and walks through the protocol's JSON-RPC 2.0 foundation, lifecycle, and security boundaries.

• •MCP is an open JSON-RPC 2.0 protocol by Anthropic for connecting LLMs to external tools and data sources
• •Architecture maps cleanly to microservices: LLM host = API gateway, MCP server = microservice, transport = stdio/SSE
• •Tutorial builds a TypeScript MCP server with Zod validation for strict, discoverable tool schemas

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