I am in the very early stages of creating a simple web-based tool for a client for internal use that can search their existing data of housing options based on certain criteria, one of which being distance from a given point. I will be using PHP and MySQL.
It's basically like an apartment locator.
The searching within a radius is the one thing I see that could pose a problem. I know this can be done easily if I had the lat/long coordinates already, but as it stands right now, I would have to convert all the addresses, and there are over 100.
The goal is to type in an address and return a list of properties X miles from that address.
Is there a way to do the lat/long conversion on the fly instead of converting all their existing property addresses to lat/long?
If I do need to do a batch conversion of addresses, so be it, but moving forward, is there a way to automate that when adding a new record?
Is there some kind of customizable apartment locator API I could use for this?
I'm not looking for any specific code, just need to be pointed in the right direction to figure out what I need to do to accomplish this.