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History of freegeoip.net
The freegeoip software is the result of a web server research project that started in 2009, written in Python and hosted on Google App Engine. It was rapidly adopted by many developers around the world due to its simplistic and straightforward HTTP API, causing the free account on GAE to exceed its quota every day after few hours of operation.
A year later freegeoip 1.0 was released, and the freegeoip.net domain moved over to its own server infrastructure. The software was rewritten using the Cyclone web framework, backed by Twisted and PyPy in production. That's when the first database management tool was created, a script that would download many pieces of information from the Internet to create the IP database, an sqlite flat file used by the server.
This version of the Python server shipped with a much better front-end as well, but still as a server-side rendered template inherited from the GAE version. It was only circa 2011 that freegeoip got its first standalone front-end based on jQuery, and is when Twitter bootstrap was first used.
Python played an important role in the early life of freegeoip and allowed the service to grow and evolve fast. It provided a lot of flexibility in building and maintaining the IP database using multiple sources of data. This version of the server lasted until 2013, when it was once again rewritten from scratch, this time in Go. The database tool, however, remained intact.
In 2013 the Go version was released as freegeoip 2.0 and this version had many iterations. The first versions of the server written in Go were very rustic, practically a verbatim transcription of the Python server. Took a while until it started looking more like common Go code, and to have tests.
Another important change that shipped with v2 was a front-end based on AngularJS, but still mixed with some jQuery. The Google map in the front page was made optional to put more focus on the HTTP API. The popularity of freegeoip has increased considerably over the years of 2013 and 2014, calling for more.
Enter freegeoip 3.0, an evolution of the Go server. The foundation of freegeoip, which is the IP database and HTTP API, now lives in a Go package that other developers can leverage. The freegeoip web server is built on this package making its code cleaner, the server faster, and requires zero maintenance for the IP database. The server downloads the file from MaxMind and keep it up to date in background.
This and other changes make it very Docker friendly.
The front-end has been trimmed down to a single index.html file that loads CSS and JS from CDNs on the internet. The JS part is based on AngularJS and handles the search request and response of the public site. The optional map has become a link to Google Maps following the lat/long of the query results.