Need a client side API for determing geo location of IP addresses

Question

I need a client side API in either Java or Ruby. I would much prefer need this to be LOCAL only. Infact this might not even be an IP, but more of a database import. The thing is that I cannot make use of a web service based one as that is too much heavy I/O for me.

Note: By geolocation, all I really need is country/region at best. I would accept actual lat/long cordinates as well.

Answer 1

I was looking at these guys a couple months ago: http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecountry

It seemed OK, for my limited purposes.

Answer 2

a quick google search yielded this result: http://www.hostip.info/dl/index.html

I think it is what you are looking for.

Answer 3

For a web based one you can use: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/. All you do is have:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=yourapikey"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;

and now Google populates some javascript variables and in your other js scripts you can now access geographic location using: google.loader.ClientLocation.address.city, google.loader.ClientLocation.address.region, google.loader.ClientLocation.address.country.

For a very rough and local solution you can get the IP ranges of countries here: http://www.countryipblocks.net/continents/. You can basically store this locally and reference it to get a rough geographic location.

Answer 4

You can program a small Javascript function to utilize AJAX to connect to a web service such as http://www.ip2location.com/ip-country-web-service.aspx which will return the country to you. This way, all the work is done by the client side.

Alternatively, you can get the database from IP2Location and then check the visitor’s IP on the server side.