Monday, September 08, 2025

Building MCP Servers: Tool Descriptions + Service Contracts = Dynamic Tool Groups

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) can easily be used to expose APIs and services in the form of MCP tools...i.e. functions/methods that can take input, perform some actions based upon that input, and produce output, without specifying a particular language or runtime.

OSGi Services (and Remote Services) provide a dynamic, flexible, secure environment for microservices, with clear well-established mechanisms for separating service contracts from service implementations.

One way to think of a service contract for large language models (LLMs) is that the service contract can be enhanced to provide LLM-processable metadata for each tool/method/function.  Any service contract can still be used by human developers (API consumers), but with tool-specific meta-data/descriptions added, larger service contracts can be also used by any model.

Since service contracts in most languages are sets of functions/methods, the service contract can also be used to represent groupings of MCP tools, or Dynamic MCP ToolGroups.   The example on the MCPToolGroups page and on the Bndtools project templates, is a simple example of grouping a set of related functions/methods into a service contract and including MCP tool meta-data (tool and tool param text descriptions).











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