As I really liked saying why I think Open Game Art is a good project I decided to start a small serie of well done free (well not only software) projects. This time SFML got to be the one.
SFML is, as the name already tells, a Simple and Fast Multimedia Library written in C++ but providing bindings for a whole bunch of other languages like Python, Ruby, C, D and others. Debian currently provides the original library as well as the C and Python bindings maintained by the Games Team and myself. On a side remark, SFML also uses my favourite License, zlib.
What I really like about SFML is the readable code all through the project. Every time I was unsure what some function does having a look at the actual implementation (and some OpenGL and X11) knowledge turned out to be quite satisfactory. This is, of course, aided by the fact that SFML's development is driven by a single Developer, Laurent Gomila.
On the rather weak points I'm still hoping the to-be-released 2.0 Version of SFML will introduce something like a stable API which it currently lacks (although the API has settled and there are no such huge changes as from 1.2 to 1.3 in recent updates any more). SFML also uses hand-made Makefiles for building (now supporting DESTDIR at least -- in some non-standard way) and has the usual load of embedded libraries which results in it's current load of patches.
For a nice time burner make sure you take a look at the python binding's snake-like clone. It clearly misses some important aspects to form a full game but it's nice nontheless. I have a (not-quite) small SFML based Project myself, a forward ported game from my old DirectX days, however it's unfortunately not yet playable again und rather stalled at the moment due to lack of time.
So much for SFML. If you feel like it feel free to join me on writing about well done pieces of software or just about pieces on how you think it should be done and tell us where you found it happening.
