The Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) is computer software, a library in the programming language Java, for chemoinformatics and bioinformatics.

The CDK was created by Christoph Steinbeck, Egon Willighagen and Dan Gezelter, then developers of Jmol and JChemPaint, to provide a common code base, on 27–29 September 2000 at the University of Notre Dame.

[11] In April 2013, John Mayfield (né May) joined the ranks of release managers of the CDK, to handle the development branch.

CDK is currently used in several applications, including the programming language R,[13] CDK-Taverna (a Taverna workbench plugin),[14] Bioclipse, PaDEL,[15] and Cinfony.

While those code bits were independent from the main CDK library, and no copylefting was involved, to reduce confusions among users, the ChemoJava project was instantiated.