This is a demo app that shows use of the App Engine Socket API, via the nntplib module. The nntp server object is created (and the socket connection opened) in a client request instance, and summary info about the newsgroup obtained; then the pickled nntp server object is passed in a task queue task payload to a (potentially) different instance, where it is used further to fetch the details of the first N posts. The task queue task pings the client via the Channel API when it has fetched the posts and stored them in the datastore, and then the client retrieves the post data from the datastore. This simple app does no caching or entity reuse, but could easily be extended to do so.