The "VAC" was the nickname that Demicron put on it's Java applet configuration software, Visual Applet Configurator. Demicron was founded in 1996 by three physics students from the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Demicron started by developing fully customizable Java applets. These applets were configured with HTML parameters. Demicron immediately saw the need for an applet configurator which would simplify the work of the applet users and to take care of the configuration of applets "visually". Anibal Wainstein started the development of the VAC in 1996, assisted by Johan Åkesson. The VAC was not the first applet configurator, an australian company had developed a similar product for their applets. However, it was not nearly so sofisticated as the VAC.

It was very important that the new applet configuration dialogs could be created without having to program them from scratch and to recompile the whole software. Demicron was releasing applets at a very high rate and having to make a new dialog specific for each applet was not realistic. The VACScript language was introduced which could be used to create new configuration dialogs for each applet very quickly. This also had the side effect that the VAC could be used by other applet developers to configure their applets, which was very good since it was free. Visual components such as color buttons, trees and file dialogs were created, so that VAC would support virtually any kind of effect and parameter type.

The dialog creation function has been extracted from the VAC and it has been modified for this system so that it works as an applet and with Flash effects. But it uses the same components that the old VAC used. Old VAC users will therefore feel at home with this system.

The Visual Applet Configurator (VAC) with an applet from Applet FX in action.