New from Developer.com today, there's this new tutorial (in the series) that aims to show you how, with the help of both Perl and PHP, to make a Geocoding web service.

In the previous installment of this four-part series regarding creating spatially enabled Web applications, you learned how to create a local datasource mapping mailing addresses to latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates using the Geo::Coder::US Perl package and the U.S Census Bureau's TIGER/Line data. In this final installment, you'll learn how to make this data available to the world through a Perl-based Web service.

To demonstrate the service's capabilities, a PHP-driven client will pass a mailing address to the Web service, retrieve the spatial data made available through this Web service, and finally feed it to the Google Maps API to produce a map marking the location of the mailing address.

If you don't really know Perl all that well, don't worry too much - they give you the code you'll need to get it set up, as well as the PHP code to make the web service connection...