Developer.com is continuing their series (on the Google Maps API, see here for a previous article) today with this new tutorial, a look at using the geocaching functionality the Google Maps API offers over a HTTP connection.

In this tutorial I showed you how to submit geocoding requests via JavaScript, which is convenient because it's easy to subsequently build a map using the retrieved coordinates. However, if you're interested in performing bulk geocoding for reason of storing a series of coordinates in a database, you might be interested in taking advantage of a second means for geocoding, accomplished by way of HTTP request.

Storing the coordinates locally will not only decrease the number of required daily geocoding requests (limited to 50,000 daily), but it will speed your application by cutting down on the total requests required to ultimately build a map.

They start off with a simple example, showing how to sed the request out to Google as well as the output. They show how to get the information you need out of the return XML. This basic example leads to something more complex - the server-side caching of the geocode results in a MySQL database.