Here's my result of few days of learning sfml
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpXinpvImgMMy 'framework' took me 3 days to look like a framework
and game itself one day.
I've started with rendering grid and cells using primitives, but it was definitely bad idea, now grid and cells are just sprites, whereas I noticed, that filling image with color in-code, gives ~20fps performance for me.
Without any cells shown it runs with 900fps, with 100 cels about 260 fps.
I'm quite sad with sfml (1.6) rendering speed, maybe just my code is wrong, but for now showing for example many tiles is just impossible.
I'll probably extend this 'game' as a part of learning openGL
LMB - set cell talive
RMB - set cell dead
G - toggle grid
P - pause/unpause simulation
+/- change speed of simulation