Any APIs for maps/geo calculations?

jwagner

Hello,

I am looking to have a feature on my site where you can enter an address in a textbox 1, and another address in textbox 2, and get the approximate distance between the two points.

I would love to know if there is an API out there that I can use both to translate the address to latitude/longitude coordinates, and to use to do calculations.

Thanks so much.

etully

I've done this two different ways.

One is just to compare zip codes. There are lots of free zip code databases on the web that also contain lat/long. This would be sufficient if you knew that 99% of the time, your addresses were relatively far apart. No real API necessary. Get the two zips, look up their lat/long, calculate distance.

The other is to find the lat/long of the street address. The last time I set this up for a client was 3-4 years ago and there was no free service. But I did find a cheap one. It's $50 for 20,000 lookups. http://geocoder.us/ Nice API. Very simple to use. Hit once for the 1st address to get the lat/long. Hit a second time for the 2nd address to get the lat/long. You'll have to calculate the difference yourself but that's trivial (algorithms all over the Internet). There might be other, one-stop solutions, but I'm not sure.

johanafm

google maps api (may or may not be free depending on your needs)

etully

Yeah, I contacted Google about that service a few months ago. It's free for non-commercial uses but prohibitively expensive for my commercial needs. $10K per year minimum.

jwagner

Thanks to you for taking the time to reply.

Is the Google API a server side API or JavaScript? I want to do it on the server.

Thanks.