As a testing framework, it provides a mechanism to run tests, receive the test's output, and relay that output further to a database. Once in the database, a report is created which is viewable in a browser. Tapat also outputs a text report after it has run the automated tests which can be sent via email for example.
Tapat is designed to be programming language agnostic. This means that you can write tests in any language that can produce TAP, and many languages can, including perl, python, php, bash, C/C++, Java, various SQL implementations, ruby, and any language that can create simple TAP output. Once your tests are written, they are run by the tapat harness and reports are created. The goal is to allow testers to focus on their testing, not the mechanism or framework that surrounds their tests, enabling a simple drop-in mechanism for new automated tests to run inside of.
Currently this web site is the only public resource for Tapat, but a large portion of the code is already written and will be migrated to publicly reachable servers shortly. Tapat itself is written in perl which has complete and canonical TAP implementations as well as a tradition of automated testing. It is licensed under the GPL and is Free Software in every sense of the term and always will be.