MCP - Model Context Protocol in Perl: From Web App to AI Tools

​The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has rapidly become the standard way for AI assistants to interact with external applications. But how do you add MCP support to an application that already exists?

​In this practical workshop we'll take a real Dancer2 application and add an MCP server that exposes its existing functionality to AI clients. Along the way we'll look at the MCP protocol, JSON-RPC, tool discovery, schema design and request handling, while keeping the implementation cleanly separated from the application's existing business logic.

​We'll see how a YAML-driven design allows a single source of truth for tool definitions and documentation, and why adding MCP often turns out to be far less work than you'd expect when your application's architecture is already sound.

​By the end of the session you'll understand the MCP protocol, know how to implement an MCP server in Perl, and have a design you can adapt to your own applications.

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​Speaker:

​Dave Cross has been writing Perl professionally for more than thirty years. He is the author of several Perl books, including Data Munging with Perl (Manning) and Perl Template Toolkit (O'Reilly), and has been speaking at Perl conferences around the world since the late 1990s.

​He builds web applications with Dancer2, contributes to open source, and has recently been exploring how established Perl applications can integrate with modern AI technologies such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP). His Line of Succession website now exposes its data through an MCP server, allowing AI assistants to query Britain's royal succession directly from the site's underlying database.

​Dave believes the best way to learn a new technology is to build something real with it, and this workshop is based on exactly that experience.