Learning to use a web service incorporated into code.
By now you should have a very nice looking guest book. We would like to incorporate some customization into the system. The customization we are going to incorporate is the ability to locate the user. Scary huh? We are going to do this through a couple of web services.
First take a look at http://www.ip2location.com/ . This is a commercial service and is pretty accurate in determining the exact location of a visitor. Unfortunately you are going to have to do this on the cheap so we are going to instead use a free service (or you can use a limited time or use demo) - I have a list of these available at Technologies Used in Web Systems.
For each log entry you should have recorded the IP address of the visitor. Now we want to add a "Location" button to each log entry. When the user clicks the location button 2 possible things could happen (1) the location is shown in the next page or (2) A map of the location is shown. You could also simply bind the location (or zip code) into the query shown in the page. Bottom line for the assignment is you must demonstrate the ability to use a web service to determine the location of a visitor.
There are quite a few web services that do things like this (feel free to help me add to my list - just email). I've moved these to the Technologies Used in Web Systems page. Just take a look, some are quite useful.
This is actually not terribly difficult, but I do recommend some time looking throught the various web services available. How you display the results are up to you. The Google API is pretty nice and is worth a real look.
Information and links about lectures supporting the assignment here
Answers to student questions about the assignment here
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/ajax/GeoLocation.aspx - Code Project demonstration of writing code that take Geolocation information and maps it in Google Maps.
Grading criteria