Rename gem?

[key88sf]

There is already a geoip2 gem which is built for the Maxmind GeoIP2 webservice (https://github.com/YotpoLtd/geoip2).

Do you plan to release this gem to rubygems and rename?

[da4nik]

I thought about this. Will do, I think.

[autarch]

Just to chime in ...

First, thank you for creating this package. It's always nice to see folks out in the community supporting our products like this.

Ideally, you'd have two packages. One would be a low-level generic MaxMind DB interface that didn't care about the specific structure of records in the database. Then you could write a higher-level GeoIP2 specific interface on top of that.

We've done this for the APIs we maintain for Perl, Python, Java, and others. Those would be good examples for you to see where the separation is. See http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/downloadable/ for links to these APIs.

I'd also note that what we've done for the GeoIP2 packages is to provide a unified high-level interface to the web service and downloadable databases. You can create either a webservice client of a database reader, but they both return essentially the same objects when you look an IP up.

Thanks,

Dave Rolsky
Director of Software Engineering
MaxMind, Inc.
www.maxmind.com

[key88sf]

@autarch Why doesn't MaxMind create an official Ruby gem for GeoIP2 ? Seems like you have SDKs for all the other major languages. I'm sure it would be very popular to have official support.

[autarch]

@key88sf - We did a survey of our customers a while back to find out what languages they were using. Ruby didn't come in very high on that list, so we decided not to make an official API for it. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of doing so in the future if we had enough customer demand. But at least for now, our officially supported languages are PHP, Python, Perl, C, C#, Java, and an Apache module.

[key88sf]

@autarch Hmm ok. I feel like if it's not done now, someone like @da4nik will create the gems eventually, so future Ruby customers would never end up requesting official gems from MaxMind. Might be good for you guys .... but when the format changes or something breaking like that happens, just sucks to wait so long for another Ruby library to come out. We use the original MaxMind GeoLite DB and are trying to migrate to version 2, so would be great to have something like this. Thanks!

[autarch]

@key88sf - We won't be making breaking changes to the format. If we did we'd call it GeoIP3 or some more creative name ;)

I do agree that having official Ruby APIs would be nice, it's just a question of resources. It'd also be nice to have official Node, Rust, Go, Haskell, Clojure, etc. APIs too. Why can't we all agree to program in one language? Surely COBOL ought to have been good enough for everyone!

[mmzoo]

So... I found this https://github.com/desuwa/hive_geoip2 and this https://github.com/alexreisner/geocoder when I was looking at https://github.com/alexreisner/geocoder#geolite2-geoip2