Google App Engine extends time limit for tasks, No more DeadlineExceededError ?

Is DeadlineExceededError a thing of the past?

The new version (1.4.0) of the google app engine was announced yesterday, details can be found here:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/

There are some interesting changes and additions, however the one change that really caught my attention is that the time limit for tasks has been increased from 15 seconds to 10 minutes!!

The 15 second limit was a real pain when trying to do any sort of even light to medium weight background processing in the GAE – any task that ran to 15s would be killed and the very annoyong DeadlineExceededError would be reported. This sometimes made life really difficult for software developers, forcing them to restructure their code into multiple smaller chained tasks etc. So this is big news!

I have run some quick tests this morning and have happily run background tasks for many minutes, so things are looking good so far!