Project Profile: "Sylvania Lighting International"

Sylvania Lighting International (SLI) is an international designer, manufacturer, and distributor of lighting systems and accessories. They are traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "SLI".

Visit Sylvania Lighting International.

Challenge One: Investors want Data!

Being a publicly traded company SLI wants its investors to have the best possible data available as soon as possible. The Depressed Press first set to work discovering what channels of data were available.

We first needed a source for stock quotes. Based on recommendations from the Depressed Press SLI chose a provider and the Depressed Press designed information retrieval and storage systems. These included database and archival systems that power an object-based user-customizable charting engine. The charting tool offers SLI investors several time spans and formats to choose from for both volume and closing information.

The Depressed Press also designed a custom interface to the SEC EDGAR database allowing up-to-date securities filings to be automatically displayed to the SLI investors.

Challenge Two: A Distributed Development Team.

The majority of development for the SLI product was being done by another firm, www.size12.com. Size12 is a great firm and easy to work with, but there are, of course, technical and architectural differences in our methodologies.

As a sub contractor the Depressed Press focused on compartmentalizing those aspects of the site that we would be working on. We designed several "black box" software components that easily integrated with the host application. Fully defining and documenting the various interfaces needed by our components allowed Size12 to quickly integrate them into the site.

A major benefit to this style of development is the freedom gained by the host application. Should, for example, SLI change their stock quote provider only the component, not infrastructure components of the site itself, will have to change.