Connected Device Configuration (CDC) has been defined as a stripped-down version of Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) with the CLDC classes added to it. Therefore, CDC was built upon CLDC, and as such, applications developed for CLDC devices also run on CDC devices.

CDC, also developed by the Java Community Process, provides a standardized, portable, full-featured Java 2 virtual machine building block for consumer electronic and embedded devices, such as smartphones, two-way pagers, PDAs, home appliances, point-of-sale terminals, and car navigation systems. These devices run a 32-bit microprocessor and have more than 2 MB of memory, which is needed to store the C virtual machine and libraries. While the K virtual machine supports CLDC, the C virtual machine (CVM) supports CDC. CDC is associated with the Foundation Profile, which is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

We'll look into CDC in more detail in the section on CDC API.