Posted by Eldodi 2 hours ago
I am running an MCP server gateway/registry (some of you may know Glama).
I cannot tell you what portion of our issues/bugs were due to the need to persist server state.
This change will allow us to offer a lot easier way for people to use Open-Source MCP servers.
My only question is how do you handle channels in the architecture now. From what I saw in Claude Code, shifting to a totally http world has some timeout issues if a server drops out and comes back. Because of that I'm stuck writing stubs for my internal use MCP, this is fine for me, but if you are cleaning up semantics: Understanding how we expect clients to act around failure would really help, the story.
Any new to share on file upload support? We have shipped a MCP server and it has been really frustrating to observe MCP clients fumbling around with base64-encodings, polluting their context window with binary data. SEP-1306 (Binary Mode Elicitation) was superseded by SEP-2356 (File input support for tools and elicitation), and that was in turned superseded by SEP-2631 (File Objects and Transfer) which is currently left in a draft state with little activity.
Allowing LLM-based agents to shuffle binary data around efficiently and reliably seems like a pretty big gap in the current specification, if you ask me!
What’s the best practice for tools where the upstream API only supports basic auth (username/password) and there’s no OBO option? In my case the login returns a token that’s only valid for an hour, so the user has to re-auth after that. Do you stash the credentials on the MCP server and silently refresh, or is there a nicer pattern people are using?
And even on the server side statefulness is very iffy anyway. How long are you going to hold something in RAM from a client and how long will you hold the connection open
e.g. mymcpserver.com/tools/call?mcp-method=search