That seems to be the best way, as google doesnt seem to provide an address to long/lat conversion
..as far as I know...
for instance, if you had an array of addresses you wanted to put pins of on a map you need the long/lat data
Ym4r is good stuff, I'm using it in a project right now. Geocoding through google is limited though to one request every couple of seconds, which in our case wasn't good enough. I actually grabbed the raw census data (TIGER), then used the geocoder.us perl code to compile our own database. Then I made up a quick webservice that queries our database first then google if it can't be found, and caches any of the google replies for future lookup.
By the way, does anyone know of a free service that will let you host large files for download? Say 800 mb? I'd be happy to share the TIGER database I compiled using the geocoder.us code, but I can't afford to make it available off our servers. Then maybe someone would have a reason to convert the perl module to ruby. I've been to lazy:)
