Google has made one of its internal tools for testing available to the general public. The tool, Ratproxy, has been released under an Apache software licence and when used will look for coding problems in web applications.

Announcing the release on Google's Code blog, Michal Zalewski, said that the application would run alongside active crawlers and manual proxies, and would work in a non-disruptive manner. " Ratproxy is there for a reason. It is designed specifically to deliver concise reports that focus on prioritised issues of clear relevance to contemporary Web 2.0 applications, and to do so in a hands-off repeatable manner," he wrote.

The tool is still in beta, and Zalewski urged potential users to consider this before using it. "You may run into problems with technologies we had no chance to examine, or that were not a priority at the time", he explained.