XMPP and offline processing coming to Google App Engine

Three weeks ago I pondered whether XMPP and offline processing were coming to Google App Engine?. It was a hunch based on the upcoming release of Jaiku on App Engine. I reasoned you couldn’t really do it without XMPP and offline processing APIs. Looks like I was right.

Today Joe Gregorio announced on the App Engine Blog an update to the roadmap for the next 6 months; including

• 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) messages

Colour me excited. This could be the point were we start seeing more and more interesting IM interfaces. And this ticks off several of my must haves for App Engine.