The new Task Queue API on Google App Engine
googleappengine.blogspot.com
googleappengine.blogspot.com
Actually, for a while, GAE didn't even have cron tasks. So we were kicking off stuff using silent ajax calls from clients.
but with that said, i still play with it since i have faith it'll mature into a full platform. and if nothing else, it's a free hosting service for experimental websites, bringing down the barrier to entry officially to zero.
But note that these quotas are bound to change, they ask for feedback on precisely these issues, task throughput per day and task length, on the Overview page: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/taskqueue/overv...
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> The Task Queue API is Python-only for now; we'll have a Java language version available soon.