MCP Transport

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) defines two transport mechanisms for communication between clients and servers: stdio (standard input/output) for local processes, and Server-Sent Events (SSE) over HTTP for remote servers, with both using JSON-RPC 2.0 as the message format. Stdio transport runs the MCP server as a child process of the client, making it ideal for IDE integrations and local tools where latency and reliability are paramount, while SSE transport connects to remote servers over the network for cloud-hosted integrations. Transport choice constrains your deployment architecture in concrete ways: a stdio-based server cannot serve multiple clients simultaneously, while an SSE server introduces network latency and authentication complexity that your implementation must address.