The Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) is a specification of a framework for Java ME applications describing the basic set of libraries and virtual-machine features that must be present in an implementation.
The CLDC is combined with one or more profiles to give developers a platform for building applications on embedded devices with very limited resources such as pagers and mobile phones.
An example of this is the absence of the Serializable interface, which does not appear in the base class library due to restrictions on reflection usage.
[4] A profile is a set of APIs that support devices with different capabilities and resources within the CLDC framework to provide a complete Java application environment.
The specification defines two independent packages that represent important features found on many PDAs and other mobile devices.