Thanks to the Task Queue API
released in SDK 1.2.3, it's easier than ever to do work 'offline', separate
from user serving requests. In some cases, however, setting up a handler for
each distinct task you want to run can be cumbersome, as can serializing and
deserializing complex arguments for the task - particularly if you have many
diverse but small tasks that you want to run on the queue.
Fortunately, a new library in release 1.2.5 of the SDK makes these ad-hoc
tasks much easier to write and execute. This library is found in
google.appengine.ext.deferred, and from here on in we'll refer to it as the
'deferred' library. The deferred library lets you bypass all the work of
setting up dedicated task handlers and serializing and deserializing your
parameters by exposing a simple function, deferred.defer().