Building MCP Servers: Alternative Transports

Many developers are creating their own MCP Servers, to integrate their applications and APIs with AI models in a consistent way across multiple models.

The MCP SDKs currently provide two transports:  stdio (standard io), and http sse.  

I've created a new open source repo for alternative mcp transports.  

The intention is to provide alternative transports with other hardware, security, and trust properties.  

The first instance is based upon Unix Domain Sockets, which restricts the inter-process communication to processes running on the same operating system.

ECF 3.14.19 released - simplify remote service discovery via properties

 ECF 3.14.19 has been released.

Along with the usual bug fixes, this release includes new documentation on the use of properties for discovering and importing remote services.   The docs describe the use of properties files for simplifying the import of remote services.   

This capability is especially useful for Eclipse RCP clients accessing Jax-RS/REST remote services.

Patrick Paulin describes a production usage his blog posting here.

RESTful OSGi R7 Remote Services with Jersey 2.28 or Apache CXF 3.3

For some time, ECF has had remote service distribution providers that use the Jersey or the CXF implementation of standard Java API for RESTful Web Services (JaxRS). 

These distribution providers allow OSGi R7 Remote Services to be defined via JaxRS annotations and implemented by either Jersey 2.28 or CXF 3.3. 

OSGi R7 Remote Services provides support for renite service discovery, dynamics, versioning, configuration and extension of the distribution providers, and asynchronous remote calls as well as other features of the OSGi R7 Remote Services and Remote Service Admin specs.

This tutorial shows the use of OSGi Remote Services with these JaxRS distribution providers on Apache Karaf.

There is also a new version of the ECF Bndtools workspace template with example Bndtools projects showing the use of these distribution providers to define, configure, run and deploy RESTful OSGi R7 Remote Services with Bndtools 4.2+.

Rest Remote Services with CXF or Jersey

ECF's Photon Release now includes an example of using Karaf with the JaxRS distribution provider.

This distribution provider now fully supports OSGi R7 remote services, including async remote services, using either the Jersey or CXF JaxRS implementations.

This allows service developers to easily use only JAX-RS annotations to define and implement OSGi R7 remote services.