Accessing GMaps javascript inside PHP

The integration hurdle I'm currently working on is accessing Google Maps javascript functions inside PHP. The reason Phoogle and the other wrappers I was able to find didn't cut it is they basically output javascript/html to the browser, they don't actually let php call the functions. They are very nice in accelerating the development of simple applications, but they don't truly re-create the GMaps API in PHP. What we'd like to be able to do is use getLatLng for the location the user enters and store that in the database, or let them choose a location if getLatLng isn't able to find anything for what they've entered.

The solution that I've come up with is to use AJAX - the page we're making the call from sends the user-entered location to another PHP page, which generates the appropriate javascript to make the call and output the collected information as XML, which then can be read by the calling page.

For now, I'm not really sure if I can implement that. Given the unpredicted constraints in learning curves and availability I've had to largely take over development of the GMaps portion of our application, and it may simply be easier to send the raw strings entered by the users over to GMaps, and if it can find a latitude and longitude for them, great, if not, oh well. Data validation is great, but we work with what we can.