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.

Andrey

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.

Nickens

They offer a free light-weight CSV file which for me, is perfect. 30mb, all I needed and seems up to date. Thanks. They also offer API's for most all common languages. – Andrey

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.

Feature

Nice find. It might be really out dated, looking through the sql file i see time stamps from 2003. Also oddly enough 1 line had to be commented out for it to compile. it is a 300mb sql file, and it is taking awhile to exectue (been running for an hour so far). – Andrey

so, did i work? i downloaded it but just had a look and didn't install. even if it is from 2003 most IP addresses will be correct :) – Peavy

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"></script>

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.

Rheometer

I like this... if you're using any of the google APIs through the loader this variable is populated. Seems pretty accurate too. Nice find. – Delta