A friend of mine has asked me to implement a zip code search for dealers for a business he's invested in. Basically they want users to enter their zip code and find the closest dealer. The problem is I have no idea how to do this and was hoping someone here could refer me to a tutorial somewhere.

I think Google Maps would get you what you want if you can get the business to give you a list of all their locations, and then build this into a kml file. Basically a geographic strain of xml. If you do that, or use a database if you're more comfortable with that, you can put a pin on the map for your customer's address and then pins for each location, then they can use the directions function and whatnot.

Google's API tutorial for their online maps application is probably the only tutorial you'll really need, if you're comfortable with other web technologies.

Here is a US zip code dump file for MySQL:

http://www.kmarshall.com/zipcodes.sql.zip

You could always take a look at the haversine formula. This will give you the distance between two points on a sphere.

I used this same process here: http://www.maxbats.com/retailerlocator.php

Wow, 3 great replies, now I don't know which to choose. I guess my decision will be based on which is easier for me to implement, since my web skills basically consist of html and css. Thanks for the help.

Originally Posted by Prometheus

A friend of mine has asked me to implement a zip code search for dealers for a business he's invested in. Basically they want users to enter their zip code and find the closest dealer. The problem is I have no idea how to do this and was hoping someone here could refer me to a tutorial somewhere.

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