JChemPaint was initiated by Christoph Steinbeck and is currently being developed as part of The Chemistry Development Kit, and a Standard Widget Toolkit-based JChemPaint application is being developed, as part of Bioclipse.
The CDK was created by Christoph Steinbeck, Egon Willighagen and Dan Gezelter, the developers of Jmol and JChemPaint at the time, to provide a common code base, on 27–29 September 2000 at the University of Notre Dame.