Get Geo Coordinates from Google Maps in PHP

Google maps offers a rich api for getting a lot of information as you are probably already aware. I’ve written a few locators in the last couple of years involving the use of google maps and doing radial searches based on zip codes. The difficult part for me was getting the geo coordinates of the queried zip code to use as a reference point for doing the radial search. I ended up writing a nice simple class to encapsulate converting zip codes into geo-coordinates.