You mean for web service calls? Yeah. I used to create SOAP web services when I coded for a living. I was under the impression that SOAP was falling out of favour and that app developers posted HTTP requests that return XML or JSON as it is less verbose.

cheers for the link.

SOAP is really easy to use - especially if your dev tools support it. You just write your classes or COM components (for Windows) and you can auto-generate a WSDL. 

Consuming them is dead easy too with languages featuring object classes that allow you to just point at the WSDL and then call the methods/functions specified in the WSDL.

From reading around I believe this is still a way to do it but mobile app devs use methods that are more "light weight". Not meaning light in function, but have less overheads.

You write code that is executed by posting to a URL and accepting params in the query string. Your code then generates a response which is typically JSON - basically an array of values serialised as a delimited string, or a chunk of XML. I have never wrangled JSON but the classes exist to parse and extract values much like classes that handle XML such as DOM.

I'm in management now and haven't coded for money in a while. I'm teaching myself PHP for fun and the way I have selected to do this is one way of doing it that I have gleaned from googling around. The technique has the acronym REST (can't remember what that stands for but in esseence is the technique I have described)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/90451/why-would-one-use-rest-instead-of-web-services

As for the copyright thing, I'm sure you'll be fine, just put it online.

...

Somewhat sublime, a rather apt rhyme...

INALB I imagine recipes (i.e. the ingredients plus instructions) are very difficult to assert copyright over. Just don't copy them word for word as you said.

He's not selling them and could probably just rely on taking them down (if ever asked which seems unlikely)?

Copyright covers people's own right to exploit their work (make money) giving copyrighted work reduces a person's ability to exploit would infringe that right.

Difficult to say whether a single recipe has copyright, could argue that it's all public domain, but a recipe from a specific person might show enough character to be copyrighted if it could be considered to be artistic and showed some element of being the authors own intellectual creation.

You can infringe database rights (ie if someone has put in a substantial investment to build up a database of cocktails themselves, taking substantial parts of that work is an infringement)

I think youd be okay if you collected recipes from various places and the recipes were fairly generic.