title: Google geocoding API (City => long, lat)
body: <p>Does Google offer a RESTful API where I can pass it a city name (or zip) and it returns the longitude &amp; latitude.</p>
  
  <p>I know how to do this with using the Google Maps API, <strong>but</strong> I really don't want to have my users download the huge 200k Google Maps API solely so that I can geocode a location.</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know of a URL based (REST) city/zip to longitude &amp; latitude API?</p>
  
  <p>Since geocoding this information then kicks off multiple other processes, doing this first step is of critical importance to have it perform quickly b/c its a bottleneck right now using the Google Maps API b/c of the huge download and JavaScript loadup.</p>