IP Tracer

This essay does not describe an existing computer program, just one that should exist. This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project.

This project outline is not like the artificial tidy problems you are spoon-fed in school, when all the facts you need are included, nothing extraneous is mentioned, the answer is fully specified, along with hints to nudge you toward a single expected canonical solution. This project is much more like the real world of messy problems where it is up to you to fully the define the end point, or a series of ever more difficult versions of this project, and research the information yourself to solve them.

Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; or give you any additional materials. I have too many other projects of my own.

Though I am a programmer, 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 in any way you please and to keep all the profits from your endeavor.

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.

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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