Ruby, C++, SDL 1.1 beta, and Namespaces Fix

[dan at ikayzo.com]

Hi Folks,

A few important updates:

I'm happy to announce SDL ports to C++ and Ruby are under way.  As you saw
from his previous posting, Jesse Weaver is working on a C++ port with Ruby
bindings.  We also have someone working on a pure Ruby port.

On a related matter, I have had a number of people comment on the current
implementation of namespaces.  Although they work as originally specified,
and made it through a design review, they clearly need to be revised.  In
the current implementation, namespaces are not truly distinct because the
same attribute name cannot exist in multiple namespaces.

This Saturday I will be releasing the first beta of SDL 1.1, which will
address this issue and add a few convenience methods.  I hope some of you
will have time to review the release and make comments.  This release will
include an updated spec and implementations in Java and C#.  I will
aggresively pursue 1.1 in terms of development and testing.  Given the
limited scope, you can expect to see a full release for Java and C# in a 3
month timeframe, with a few betas in between.

Finally, I have been working on a relatively large project for a current
customer (a major US bank) using SDL.  We are building a comprehensive
SDL/Swing binding that allows you to easily build Swing GUIs using SDL. 
SDLs syntax has proven much more natural in this domain than XML schemas
such as XUL and XAML.  Following is an example of a browser interface
created with SDL (screenshot attached):

pane layout="border" ID="browser_root" {
	pane layout="horizontal" constraint="north" border="2,2,2,2" {
		label "URL" border="0,5,0,3"
		text constraint="stretch" ID="url_field" action="bsh:goURL"
		button "Go" action="bsh:goURL"
		spacer size=5
		button "<<" action="bsh:back"
		button ">>" action="bsh:forward"
	}
	browser URL="http://cnn.com" ID="browser"
	label "Greetings" border="2,5,2,5" ID="status_bar" constraint="south"
}

Finally, from now on C# and Java releases will happen at the same time.

As always, comments, questions, and creative insults are welcome.

Cheers,
Dan