XMPP and offline processing coming to Google App Engine

Wow all these features will enable a whole new bunch of types of apps to be built on GAE. The receiving emails part is an exciting surprise. I've just been prototyping an GAE idea involving receiving and parsing emails but got stuck in the conundrum of getting Python POP/IMAP libs to work around all the limitations of GAE (no socket communication allowed). I'm just about to give up and saw this news today. Woot!

This is huge for me. I have several apps running on AppEngine and one of them is a soon to be released location-based game for mobile phones (starting with the iPhone).

I have had to jump through tons of hoops in order to eliminate the need for background processes. Not to mention that sometimes you need just a little longer than the request timeout to process a data set.

I think that Jaiku is a perfect example of how "eating your own dogfood" makes your product better / more useful. I am really looking forward to the source being released too.

XMPP FTW!

I wonder whether my bot will go offline if reaches quota? If no quota is set to XMPP then we could build a p2p file sharing network (NNTP-like using XMPP s2s federation) on top of GAE!