If you’ve been following tech news at all today, you’ll know that it’s obviously been a very big day for Google. The company kicked off its annual Google I/O developer conference, and has had no shortage of announcements, including an Android update, Google Music Beta, movie rentals in the Android Market, Google TV enhancements, new ad targeting options, and a project aimed at connecting Android to more of your home appliances and electronics. That’s to name a few.

In the midst of all of this, Google also talked today about its plans for Google App Engine – the platform, which lets developers develop and host applications on Google’s infrastructure. The company says it will be graduating from preview status later this year, which should mean big things for businesses.

“When App Engine graduates from preview status, which we expect to do in the second half of this year, we’ll add additional enterprise-grade features that allow us to support many more business application scenarios,” explains App Engine Senior Product Manager Greg D’Alesandre . “Graduation from preview status also indicates a longer term commitment by Google to the product and provides a deprecation policy whereby we will support prior versions of product APIs for a guaranteed amount of time, allowing applications written to prior API specifications to continue to function.”

Google launched Google App Engine version 1.5.0 today, which includes the following features, as described by D’Alesandre:

• With Backends (for both Python and Java), App Engine can now support applications that require long running and high memory processes. This feature allows for new classes of applications such as report generation apps and custom search engines to be hosted on the platform.
• The improvements to Task Queues allow for applications to control how tasks are executed and easily share the work using the new REST-based APIs. This API access expands App Engine’s compatibility with other on-premise and cloud services, furthering our commitment to an open development platform.
• With 1.5.0 we are launching an experimental runtime for the Go Programming Language. Go is an open source, statically typed, compiled language with a dynamic and lightweight feel. It’s also an interesting new option for App Engine because Go apps will be compiled to native code, making Go a good choice for more CPU-intensive tasks. As of today, the App Engine SDK for Go is available for download, and we will soon enable deployment of Go apps into the App Engine infrastructure. If you’re interested in starting early, sign up to be first through the door when we open it up to early testers.

When App Engine leaves preview status, Google says it will provide a 99.95% uptime service level agreement, operational and developer support, offline billing, new terms of service, and a new pricing plan, which can be reviewed here.