“In the last installment, ‘Integrating Google Maps Into Your Web
Applications,’ you learned how to take advantage of Google’s
amazingly convenient mapping API. In this tutorial, I mentioned the
API doesn’t yet offer a means for translating addresses to
latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. Because these coordinates
are required to display locations and plot points, information
about two third-party solutions capable of doing so was provided:
doing so through the geocoder.us website or by creating your own
data repository using the Perl module Geo::Coder::US and the freely
available U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line data. Because the reader
response to this most recent article was considerable, I’ve decided
to continue the discussion by showing you how to retrieve these
coordinates using the geocoder.us Web services and PHP scripting
language. In the next installment, I’ll introduce the second
solution requiring the Geo::Coder::US module…”