It looks like Google is already some code with the Google AppEngine SDK that expose its future background processing support:

I just spotted this in the latest SDK release

so it looks like cron (among other things) is

just around the corner:

$ ls -la google/appengine/cron/

total 272

drwxr-xr-x 12 samj admin 408 17 Jan 12:18 .

drwxr-xr-x 11 samj admin 374 17 Jan 12:18 ..

-r--r--r-- 1 samj admin 27359 15 Jan 03:16 GrocLexer.py

-rw-r--r-- 1 samj admin 25813 17 Jan 12:18 GrocLexer.pyc

-r--r--r-- 1 samj admin 21071 15 Jan 03:16 GrocParser.py

-rw-r--r-- 1 samj admin 18377 17 Jan 12:18 GrocParser.pyc

-r-xr-xr-x 1 samj admin 646 15 Jan 03:16 __init__.py

-rw-r--r-- 1 samj admin 313 17 Jan 12:18 __init__.pyc

-r-xr-xr-x 1 samj admin 1909 15 Jan 03:16 groc.py

-rw-r--r-- 1 samj admin 3050 17 Jan 12:18 groc.pyc

-r-xr-xr-x 1 samj admin 7848 15 Jan 03:16

groctimespecification.py

-rw-r--r-- 1 samj admin 10029 17 Jan 12:18

groctimespecification.pyc

From the comments in the code, here's what you can expect:

A Groc schedule looks like '1st,2nd monday 9:00', or

'every 20 mins'. This module takes a parsed schedule

(produced by Antlr) and creates objects that

can produce times that match this schedule.

A parsed schedule is one of two types - an Interval,

and a Specific Time. See the class docstrings for more.

I think a lot of people have been waiting for this for a long time.