The main difference between MCP and REST is `list-tools`.
REST APIs have 5 or 6 ways of doing that, including "read it from our docs site", HATEOAS, OAS running on an endpoint as part of the API.
MCP has a single way of listing endpoints.
REST APIs have 5 or 6 ways of doing that, including "read it from our docs site", HATEOAS, OAS running on an endpoint as part of the API.
MCP has a single way of listing endpoints.
> REST APIs have 5 or 6 ways of doing that
You think nobody's ever going to publish a slight different standard to Anthropic's MCP that is also primarily intended for LLMs?
OpenAPI, OData, gRPC, GraphQL
I'm sure I'm missing a few...
Is there anything stopping generic MCP servers for bridging those protocols as-is? If not, we might as well keep using them.
- Introspection (__schema queries) for every graphQL server. You can even see what it exposes because most services expose a web playground for testing graohQL APIs, e.g. GitHub: https://docs.github.com/en/graphql/overview/explorer
- Server Reflection for gRPC, though here it's optional and I'm not aware of any hosted web clients, so you'll need a tool like gRPCCurl if you want to see how it looks in real services yourself.
- OpenAPI is not a protocol, but a standard for describing APIs. It is the list-tools for REST APIs.
So why are we all bitching about it? Programmatically communicating with an ML model is a new thing, and it makes sense it might need some new concepts. It’s basically just a wrapper with a couple of opinions. Who cares. It’s probably better to be more opinionated about what exactly you put into MCP, rather than just exposing your hundreds of existing endpoints.