We built basically the exact same library at foursquare (though it's in Scala not Java). Would anyone be interested in using it if we open sourced it? We probably should.
Yes, it would be great if you open-sourced the library! I'd suggest promoting it as an alternative to SimpleGeo's service that provided this lookup, since that will be shut down at the end of March. See https://support.urbanairship.com/customer/portal/articles/31...
Definitely, we were planning to develop exactly the same system in our social network http://ollaa.com (uses foursquare venues db). I believe that has become a common need for global soical apps. We'd love to see you are open sourcing it, otherwise we will definitely not pay $2,000 for this.
Can't imagine it will cost you less to develop in house in terms of salaried engineering hours, and you probably won't get close to AskGeo in terms of performance. A fast spatial index is non trivial. Classic case of not properly valuing the cost of internal engineering resources.
That would be really useful to the community. You should definitely open source it.
I'd love to see this open sourced! It'd make a wonderful companion to the great open mapping work being done my Open Street Map and is exactly the kind of thing a community can build on and refine for the good of all.
I am interested. I used an approximation algorithm that have a lot of edge cases. A complete and accurate open source solution is very great.
Yes, it's definitely useful. I use AskGeo to tag GPS files users create with the correct timezone.
yes! (so many interesting things can be done once you have a nice way to get ahold of proper zone info via a sane api / library)