SOAP or REST based Geotargetting service?

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+1 Q:

SOAP or REST based Geotargetting service?

Is anyone aware of a (preferablly free) webservice that would accept a SOAP or REST request.

This request would contain an IP address, and the service would return an approximation of that IP's location.

EDIT: I need resolution down to the city of possible.

+2 A:

MaxMind do a fairly cheap one. You send the IP as a query string parameter, then it sends you back either a 2 letter code or an error code. We used it for quite a while before moving to our own lookup tables, and it's quick and reliable.

Found the link: http://www.maxmind.com/app/web_services#country - it's $20 for 200,000 lookups which isn't bad value at all.

EDIT: MaxMind also do a service with resolution down to the city: http://www.maxmind.com/app/web_services#city. It's a bit more expensive at $20 for 50,000 queries but that still isn't too bad. I can't vouch for the accuracy of this service though as I have only used the country resolution one, as that's all we need.

Greg Beech 2008-09-22 22:17:41

That's not REST, that's basically RPC over HTTP.

Jim 2008-09-22 22:25:05

So the question specifically asked for REST or SOAP. That is neither.

Jim 2008-09-22 23:20:08

Yawn. Whining about semantics doesn't help anybody. You can't built a REST-style service for this because the artefact (the country code) for a given URL is non-constant, so my assumption was that any web based service with a trivial to construct request would be sufficient.

Greg Beech 2008-09-22 23:28:28

I'm not whining about semantics, I'm merely pointing out that somebody asked specifically for REST or SOAP, and this is neither. You can easily build a REST-style service for this, for example, you could treat IP addresses as resources, and the country they reside in as data within those resources.

Jim 2008-09-23 00:10:28

I'd be really surprised if anybody except ivory tower purists were that bothered about whether the end of the URL is ?ip=80.192.33.20 or /80.192.33.20 - but if you feel that strongly about it then feel free to give the answer a negative vote. I prefer pragmatism.

Greg Beech 2008-09-23 00:19:31

Look mate, I'm not saying REST is best. I'm not saying that you are a bad programmer. I'm not saying MaxMind is not useful. All I'm saying is that Jonathan asked for REST or SOAP, and that is neither. Quit being so over-sensitive. You're lashing out because I dared point out a problem? Grow up.

Jim 2008-09-23 00:32:01

FYI, RPC over a querystring would suffice. I'd have preferred SOAP, as we have an existing SOAP logging and cacheing framework, but you take what you can get :)

FlySwat 2008-09-23 00:44:54

There is http://countries.nerd.dk which provides country information by IP. How much resolution do you need?

Greg Hewgill 2008-09-22 22:17:49

@Greg, Thanks for the recommendation, however we serve 2M unique per day, so I don't think an additional cost of $288k per year would help the geotargetting business case :)

FlySwat 2008-09-23 00:47:28

+1 A:

It's not a web service, but MaxMind also provide a free database that you can download. If you need a web service, then it would be trivial to set one up on your own server using this database. You can also get a site-license for a more accurate database if the free one isn't suitable.

Jim 2008-09-23 01:18:53

ansaurus

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SOAP or REST based Geotargetting service?

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