I came across this updated Google AppEngine roadmap via Dare’s post, Google App Engine on the road to becoming useful for building real web applications.

• Support for running scheduled tasks
• Task queues for performing background processing
• Ability to receive and process incoming email
• Support for sending and receiving XMPP (Jabber) message

This could end up being very competitive with Azure and has definitely re-peaked my interest in AppEngine. Those are four very instrumental features for building great applications in today’s web world. I might need to start spending more time with python again.

Of course, some real dates from both Google and Microsoft would be very helpful. The blog post on AppEngine mentions a conference and May and 6 months. Meanwhile, Amazon just keeps bringing more functionality to market.