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Answer 1

+1 A:

You could use a cookie to identify anon users. Some will disable cookies or delete them, but it will give you a better result and is quite cheap to implement.

The problem with IP based filtering is that a lot of people are behind firewalls and you may fail to count hits for multiple users behind a single firewall.

Kris 2010-03-17 11:01:39

Answer 2

+1 A:

You can create filter, map it to "/*". In this filter you can store information about user in session:

 HttpSession session = request.getSession(true);

 Integer ival = (Integer) session.getValue("knownuser");
 if (ival==null) {
     ival = new Integer(1);
     incrementUsersCounter ();
     session.putValue("knownuser", ival);
 }

Roman 2010-03-17 11:02:13

Ok, and for anonymous users?

The Elite Gentleman 2010-03-17 11:07:48

@The Elite Gentleman: session will be created regardless of whether the user is logged in or not. It's just cookies (or URL modification).

Roman 2010-03-17 11:15:48

But for anonymous viewers, how can I determine if the viewer is unique and not flooding requests to increase viewer count?

The Elite Gentleman 2010-03-17 11:33:21

We are discussing this about an hour already. You'd better read some intro manuals about servlets, sessions (I mean HttpSession in java), filters. After that you'll know the answer for sure.

Roman 2010-03-17 11:54:32

Answer 3

+1 A:

Maybe you could start looking into a totally different direction first: In case you're already using Google Analytics (or similar), you could use it's API to fetch page view data for the current page. The data won't be completely up to date, but the implementation is extremely simple and might already do what you need.

sfussenegger 2010-03-17 11:36:49

Answer 4

A:

JAVA SERVLET api offers us on this matter sessionCreated(HttpSessionEvent se) and sessionDestroyed(HttpSessionEvent se). These method will be called as a notification that a new session was created and the session was about to be destroyed respectively. Lets have servlet code as below

03.import javax.servlet.http.HttpSessionEvent;
04.import javax.servlet.http.HttpSessionListener;
05.import javax.servlet.http.HttpSession;
06.import java.util.List;
07.import java.util.ArrayList;
08. 
09.public class SessionCounter implements HttpSessionListener
10.{
11.    private List sessions = new ArrayList();
12. 
13.    public SessionCounter()
14.    {
15.    }
16. 
17.    public void sessionCreated(HttpSessionEvent event)
18.    {
19.        HttpSession session = event.getSession();
20.        sessions.add(session.getId());
21. 
22.        session.setAttribute("counter", this);
23.    }
24. 
25.    public void sessionDestroyed(HttpSessionEvent event)
26.    {
27.        HttpSession session = event.getSession();
28.        sessions.remove(session.getId());
29. 
30.        session.setAttribute("counter", this);
31.    }
32. 
33.    public int getActiveSessionNumber()
34.    {
35.        return sessions.size();
36.    }
37.}

to display number of users we will have a JSP page as follows

<html>
<head>
    <title>Session Counter</title>
</head>

<body>
<%
    SessionCounter counter = (SessionCounter) session
            .getAttribute("counter");
%>
Number of online user(s): <%= counter.getActiveSessionNumber() %>
</body>
</html>

And setting up web.xml file I hope it works

giri 2010-03-17 11:49:00

Is that a good idea to keep all the Session in a List ? I think this may not be ideal? We could just have a count instead of the whole list.

Calm Storm 2010-03-17 12:10:54

I agree Calm Storm. @Giri, what you did I've already have this done months ago. It's called session counter (in my case). Instead of holding a list, I have a `static long` variable that gets increased/decreased by 1 when a session is created/destroyed respectively.

The Elite Gentleman 2010-03-17 14:36:56

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