Get IP, ISP and GeoLocation of a webpage visitor

Question

Is there any way to get the ISP and GeoLocation for a user that access a website in Java?

Getting the IP is easy. It's request.getRemoteAddr() . Any hints on getting the ISP and location? Are there any API's or libraries available? I'm guessing that you have to map all the IPs to ISPs. Any ideas?

Answer 1

There is no ready solution in Java. In general there is only one method to do it - you should use whois protocol to access data about host's ip from Regional Internet Register (RIR), for example from http://www.db.ripe.net/whois . Other solutions in the Internet will more or less depend on RIRs + some algorithm to process data.

There is a possibility to use telnet to connect to RIPE or copy a snapshot of database onto your server.

The only problem is that the output from whois is not very convenient to process. Everything depends on your application and required accuracy.

Answer 2

Try with MaxMind GeoIp Java API. The more complete and accurate IP database is commercial, but they have a free Country and City "light" database.

http://www.maxmind.com/app/java