The core component of this application is its ability to find other locations near an existing location. The easiest way to find this information is to take advantage of a third-party API. For this application, we'll be using the Google Places API, a web API that can provide nearby locations from given latitude and longitude coordinates.
##Showing locations Rather than simply telling our users what locations are near a given point of interest, we can enhance user experience by showing them the points of interest and nearby locations on a map. Many different mapping sources exist to show a map. For this application, we'll take advantage of another Google API, the Google Maps API.
##Searching nearby locations To search nearby locations, we're going to take advantage of the Google Places API. Rather than implementing the API documentation ourselves, as outlined in https://developers.google.com/places/documentation/, we're going to take advantage of an open source wrapper for the API located at https://github.com/ joshtronic/php-googleplaces. To take advantage of this wrapper, we download the repository to our extensions folder.