Accessing Sonos via Java

[Ryan McFall]

Hi:

I'm hoping that this is the right way to post a message to this group; I've
not used google groups before and I can't seem to join the group (at least
the interface never tells me that I'm actually a member of the group).

I've seen all the posts here with .NET code for accessing the Sonos player.
I am teaching a course on web programming in the upcoming fall, and we have
thought that it would be a fun project for students to write code to manage
the Sonos player over the web. I know that at least one project has been
posted to the group to do just that, but everything I've seen is C#/.NET.
I'd like to have my students use Java, as that is what they are most
familiar with. It looks like the only API for the Sonos player is the UPnP
one (although I can't even find any information on that by doing a web
search).

Does anyone know if it would be possible to interface with the Sonos player
using Java? And, is there documentation for this UPnP interface available
(I think there are Java interfaces to UPnP if I had to go that route).

Any information that people have would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Ryan

Ryan McFall
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Hope College
Holland, MI 49423
(616) 395-7952

[Steve Eisner]

Hi, Ryan -

 

First, in addition to whatever web interface you decide to write, there are really two separate projects when dealing with the Sonos:

1) writing or integrating a UPNP package

2) using that to access the Sonos APIs (which are mostly Intel media standard)

I'd say these took me equal time when playing around with my projects!

 

Here's a link to a discussion I found which has helpful links about Java UPNP development. 

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/archive/index.php/t-226934.html

Specifically, they mention an open-source UPNP library, and the Intel SDK may provide Java libraries as well.  I haven't investigated this much myself since I use J# rather than Sun's Java.

 

Once you've tamed Java UPNP programming, I think you'll find that any of the C# source we've released is fairly easy to convert to Java.  The two languages are nearly identical in syntax and the Java lang/util libraries (string, collection, I/O, etc) have exact equivalents in C#.

 

If you need any help understanding specific Sonos API calls, post here and I'm sure we can help!

 

Steve