Google App Engine team has rolled out a major release for this year. In release of 1.4.0 they have done a lot of improvements and increased limits. I am very happy that they have increased the time limit of executing cron job (background task) from 30 seconds to 10 minute.

For high demanding apps, its also very to good to keep their site ready to server quickly. Not a bad deal of paying $9 a month about it.

The enhancements and according to the announcement on their group:

• The Always On feature allows applications to pay and keep 3 instances of their application always running, which can significantly reduce application latency.
• Developers can now enable Warmup Requests. By specifying  a handler in an app’s appengine-web.xml, App Engine will attempt to to send a Warmup Request to initialize new instances before a user interacts with it. This can reduce the latency an end-user sees for initializing your application.
• The Channel API is now available for all users.
• Task Queue has been officially released, and is no longer an experimental feature. The API import paths that use ‘labs’ have been deprecated. Task queue storage will count towards an application’s overall storage quota, and will thus be charged for.
• The deadline for Task Queue and Cron requests has been raised to 10 minutes. Datastore and API deadlines within those requests remain unchanged.
• For the Task Queue, developers can specify task retry-parameters in their queue.xml.
• Metadata Queries on the datastore for datastore kinds, namespaces, and entity properties are available.
• URL Fetch allowed response size has been increased, up to 32 MB. Request size is still limited to 1 MB.
• The Admin Console Blacklist page lists the top blacklist rejected visitors.
• The automatic image thumbnailing service supports arbitrary crop sizes up to 1600px.
• Overall average instance latency in the Admin Console is now a weighted average over QPS per instance.
• Added a low-level AysncDatastoreService for making calls to the datastore asynchronously.
• Added a getBodyAsBytes() method to QueueStateInfo.TaskStateInfo, this returns the body of the task state as a pure byte-string.
• The whitelist has been updated to include all classes from javax.xml.soap.
• Fixed an issue sending email to multiple recipients.

You can download GAE 1.4.0 from Google Code.