IP Tracer

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

This is project is a Servlet. Your job is to track the IP’s of incoming callers, and try to guess roughly the latitude and longitude of where they are calling from. You then prepare a map of the world or the country showing little dots indicating where people are calling from. Brighter dots are from more recent visits. You serve a dynamically generated map, or one that is cached and refreshed every ten minutes or so.

If you want to get fancy, you project the data onto to an image of earth from space, live or at least from the same time of day as now, or a simulated cloud-free map showing the sun shadows.

You might generate the image by execing some 3D imaging program.

One way of building up the map of ip to position is to ask people where there are. You can then later interpolate ips. There are commercial IP to latitude lookup tables you can buy, but you likely don’t need that degree of precision.

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