zip code finder

Does anyone have any experience setting up a zip code location finder for a site you have (or that of a clients)?

I have a non-gambling client that contacted me seeking this. (Of course as often happens with clients, they want it done yesterday but waited until today to enlist my help in making it happen.)

This would be a dedicated page that a visitor could put in a zip code and search and it would return a list of closest locations to that search. My hope would be that the result set would be easily implimented to allow a link to a section of the site that caters to that geographic search, or at least return the contact details etc for the search.

I have found a few "third party hosted solutions" but I prefer to find something I can put on the server and handle completely in-house but as I research this some of them seem kinda complicated.

My research so far has led me to believe that the majority of these take the exact center of the zip code and translate it into lattitude and longitude coordinates, and then pick the closest locations according to their lat & long coordinates.

As far as actually using a third party method, I may consider that as a more temporary solution, although if it works well and is free or very inexpensive it could become permanent.

Javascript, mysql, php or even asp or .NET solutions would be fine (although the asp/net choices are lower on the list). I am trying to 100% completely stay away from anything perl, and although curl is not a favorite of mine if I recall there isn't much overhead from it and I think it only needs a small exe that needs to be in the path to do it's job so that is an option I would consider.

I am really looking for someone that has actually done this, or at least knows someone who has implimented this on a site and what you went through to get it working, and how many times you actually had to hit yourself in the head with a baseball bat until it actually returned the search results that you were hoping for.....

So let the recommendations, finger pointing and laughing continue.

Rick
Universal4

i use maxmind db

So have you actually implimented something similar to what I defined in my post?

Rick
Universal4