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Easy Lookup is the Secret Sauce for Large-Scale Database App

Counterpoint Systems has been building rights and royalties software for the entertainment and licensing industries since 1987. Music publishers, record companies, film production and distribution companies all use Counterpoint to access thousands upon thousands of records for song titles, composers, producers and royalty rates.

Counterpoint was preparing to port its existing text-based music publishing application to a browser-based interface. “We knew the biggest challenge would be presenting a massive amount of information in a fast, user-friendly way” says Ben Katovsky the project leader at Counterpoint Systems. The application would need to effortlessly search for and locate the precise data users are looking for. If users cannot locate records they tend to create duplicates, which wastes time and clutters the database with redundant data. Therefore, easy lookup became a key criteria for the new application’s interface. Ben was also convinced that the data lookup should happen in one screen so users wouldn’t waste time jumping between screens. “We needed a mechanism for selecting data that wouldn’t add extra steps into the lookup process.”

To make navigating around the application fast and easy, Counterpoint integrated Nitobi’s ComboBox into the application. Nitobi ComboBox is an Ajax-powered auto-complete component that can be easily added to web-based apps. It provides a simple and intuitive user interface for searching database information and making data selections. “Nitobi’s ComboBox is fundamental in the way our customers interact with the application,” said Ben. Each time a user queries for a record, or selects a specific song, they interact with ComboBox.

In addition, in order to intuitively understand the user interface, Counterpoint’s customers would need to look up data in a variety of ways randomly selecting the data points. For example, one might search for a composer or music publisher, or by a department or a territory code. Nitobi’s was the only ComboBox Counterpoint found that acknowledged vastly different search criteria with flexible filtering and search modes, including suggestive search and fuzzy searching.

Speed was imperative for the browser-based application and another reason for choosing Nitobi ComboBox. “The application needed to be as fast in a browser-based environment as in a text environment,” said Ben. Using an ultra-concise data transport method, ComboBox retrieves data very quickly and minimizes network traffic.

Counterpoint’s browser-based application is primarily Java-based and runs JSPs, dynamic HTML, XML, JavaScript and Ajax and has an IBM DB2 database on the back end. Nitobi Grid and Tree are also implemented within the application. “We’ve had a positive experience with Nitobi,” said Ben. “We’re impressed with their knowledge and impressed with what their Ajax components can do.”

The browser-based version of the Counterpoint application has improved the user experience. “The speed factor alone saves our customers a lot of time and effort.” With the help of Nitobi ComboBox, the new visual user interface updates Counterpoint’s technology offering and improves the user experience.

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“We’re impressed with their knowledge and impressed with what their Ajax components can do.”