For those interested in such things, I've completely revised the Zend_Scheduler proposal to take into account all comments received to date. I welcome any and all additional feedback.
Briefly (and a bit densely), Zend_Scheduler is "a request-based job scheduling component designed to allow easy scheduling of tasks based on simple temporal constraints, without the use of OS-based applications such as Crontab." http://framework.zend.com/wiki/display/ZFDEV/Zend_Scheduler Thanks! -Matt