A RESTful HTTP Mental Model to Understand MCP

An exploration of how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) can be understood through familiar web development mental models. The post maps RESTful HTTP concepts (methods, resources, status codes, endpoints) to MCP equivalents (tools, business resources, tool responses, MCP server resources), and also attempts to apply the MVC paradigm to MCP architecture. A JavaScript code example using Anthropic's MCP SDK illustrates a Travel Planner MCP Server with tools for searching flights and cancelling bookings. The author notes MCP's underlying JSON-RPC 2.0 transport is actually closer to GraphQL than REST, and that MVC may be a better fit as a mental model overall.