One piece of recently functionality to a site I'm writing is the ability to look up places on a Google powered map.

There are a variety of ways to insert a Google map into your site, but the first real hurdle is the lookup code.

Google does not use an address to position its map, it uses the Latitude and Longitude co-ordinates to place the map area around the desired location.

Google has pretty extensive documentation around this here:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/index.html

Rather than translate the locations on the fly on a per-hit basis I thought I would perform the lookup when the record is submitted to the database, that way I can cut down the number of google hits, and just reference the local data. Google also prefers this method, as it is less process intensive on their end of things.

First you need an API key:

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

This application already has methods for setting the data in a table, so I am simply going to call another packaged method to calculate the latitude and longitude, and store them in the table with the other data.

As you can see from above, I am simply creating a text string URL, and using cfhttp to GET the result from http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?

The screenshot below show the returned responses, and the http status code.

The result is parsed into a struct and returned to the parent function to be stored. Far less overhead than doing this for every map call.

Please note that this is far more heavily commented for Blog purposes. Now to actually call the service using the lat and long variables stored, but thats another article.