## Motivation and Context
The MCP specification defines the `ping` utility for verifying that the peer of
a connection is still responsive. The Ruby SDK server side already replies to
incoming `ping` requests with an empty result, but `MCP::Client` had no public API
to send a `ping` request. Users had to build the JSON-RPC payload themselves and
call the transport directly.
This adds a client-side counterpart to the existing server handler and aligns
the Ruby SDK in spirit with the Python and TypeScript SDKs, which expose
`ClientSession.send_ping` and `Client.ping` respectively. Those SDKs validate
the response envelope via type schemas (`EmptyResult` / `EmptyResultSchema`) and raise
their validation library's generic exception (Pydantic's `ValidationError` / Zod's `ZodError`).
The Ruby client applies a Hash type check on `result`
(matching Python's behavior of requiring a dict while allowing arbitrary contents)
and raises a new `MCP::Client::ValidationError` for malformed responses,
keeping `MCP::Client::ServerError` reserved for JSON-RPC error responses.
## How Has This Been Tested?
Client tests cover:
- request structure (method is `ping`, no `params`)
- empty result on success
- `ServerError` on JSON-RPC error response
- `ValidationError` on a response missing `result`
- `ValidationError` on a `result` of the wrong type (e.g., String)
- propagation of transport-level errors raised by `transport.send_request`
The existing server-side `ping` handler tests continue to pass unchanged.
## Breaking Changes
None. `MCP::Client#ping` and `MCP::Client::ValidationError` are purely additive.
The server-side `ping` handler behavior is unchanged.