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. The first source code release was made on 11 May 2011. Since then more than 100 people have contributed to the project, leading to a rich set of functions, as given below. Between 2004 and 2007, "CDK News" was the project's newsletter of which all articles are available from a public archive. Due to an unsteady rate of contributions, the newsletter was put on hold.