Need a client side API for determing geo location

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

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.

Answer 2

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

It seemed OK, for my limited purposes.

Answer 3

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

I think it is what you are looking for.