proximity search

I'm developing a site that needs to utilize a delivery area component in address location. Typically a node would have a single geolocation, but for delivery a node would have a radius around a single point (so multiple points). Does anybody know what the best way to implement this would be so that a proximity search would give proper results based on multiple points?

Thanks!

There are several modules in Drupal 6 that manage addresses, geocoding and geospatial points. I would like to see a discussion about them and their better parts to base the construction of an address management system in Drupal 7. I am pulling comments I made in the Address Field module for Drupal 7 module issue queue as I originally wanted to express the ideas here in the the Geolocation Group to make them available to a wider audience. The original thread is at http://drupal.org/node/1093392#comment-4256540.

I would like to implement a "behavior" to my openalayers map to load/display locations depending on the zoom level and map area. You can see an example here:
http://yellow.local.ch/en/q/Z%C3%BCrich/Restaurant.html

If you zoom in, the map as well the list of restaurants gets updated.

Such a behavior (at least for the map) was also implemented in Drupal with gmap and views at opengreenmap.org: http://www.opengreenmap.org/greenmap/ by tom_o_t.

I am creating a web site for lost / found pets.

Each pet's info will have a node.

I would like to let people narrow by location based on map, zip code, street/city/state and distance.

There are a lot of geo modules. Any ideas what would work best? I have found the location CCK field but want to make sure I am using the best method. I am guessing my needs are relatively simple but I would like it to be robust.

Also, Home Again (a pet microchip service) recently released an iphone app. Any mobile considerations would be great.

Thanks for any ideas.

Users have their own location, provided to us by the User Location module.

Users can also create nodes, and these nodes have their own location, provided to us by the Location module.

Is there a method via Views - or any other way! - of creating a proximity search of nodes that uses the User's location (ie the node author) as the basis of the search?