Model Context Protocol (MCP) Explained: Theory, Architecture, and a Java + Spring Boot + Docker Tutorial

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0300

I’ve written before about agentic AI and building with Spring AI. Both of those posts touched on a problem that keeps coming up once you move past toy demos: how does an AI application actually get access to your data and your tools, in a way that isn’t a bespoke integration for every single one? That’s the problem the Model Context Protocol (MCP) sets out to solve.

This post is in two parts. First, the theory — what MCP actually is, its architecture, and the concepts you need before anything else makes sense. Then a full hands-on tutorial: we’ll build a real MCP server in Java with Spring Boot, run it, call it with raw JSON-RPC over curl, and package it up with Docker.

MCP on Umut Doğan

Model Context Protocol (MCP) Explained: Theory, Architecture, and a Java + Spring Boot + Docker Tutorial