I’ve been running a team at Google for a while now, implementing capabilities in Javascript. Fans of this blog will remember that long ago I did a thing called CaPerl. The idea in CaPerl was to compile a slightly modified version of Perl into Perl, enforcing capability security in the process.

Caja follows a similar path, except rather than modify Javascript, we restrict it to a large subset. This means that a Caja program will run without modification on a standard Javascript interpreter – though it won’t be secure, of course! When it is compiled then, like CaPerl, the result is standard Javascript that enforces capability security. What does this mean? It means that Web apps can embed untrusted third party code without concern that it might compromise either the application’s or the user’s security.

Caja will be open source, under the Apache License. We’re still debating whether we will drop our existing code for this as a starting point, or whether we want to take a different approach, but in any case, there’s plenty to be done.

Although the site has been up for a while, I was reluctant to talk about it until there was some way for you to be involved. Now there is – we have a public mailing list. Come along, read the docs (particularly the Halloween version of the spec) and join in the discussions. I’m very excited about this project and the involvement of some world class capability experts, including Mark Miller (of E fame) who is a full-time member of the Caja development team.