Roku Developer Program

[chintan]

All,
As a newbie to Roku developer world, I have a bunch of queries re: Roku API.

The overall goal we are trying to achieve (by using these APIs) is as follows,
* Cancel a Roku Subscription by pinging some API with some parameters from our systems
* Refund money to Roku subscribers (either partially or completely) using some API
* Get notified by Roku when,
** We get money from subscribers (at beginning of a new billing cycle)
** Subscribers are refunded money (for whatever reason)
** Subscribers have cancelled their subscription (from Roku directly)

I have been trying to go through their API docs & I am not able to see any consistent way of doing things. This is the doc I am referring to >>> https://roku.app.box.com/s/fdyi280hrd4vhwjagbxo

So I am wondering if their is a new/updated exhaustive version of their API.

Additionally I need answers to following questions,

* Is their a sandbox environment for starting/cancelling new subscriptions?
* How to specify separate endpoints for sandbox vs production for Push Notifications?
** Currently there is only one input under "Web API Settings"
* What is the difference between "Issue Credit" & "Issue Refund"?
* What is the difference between the following Push notifications - "Sale", "Credit" & "Refund"?
* Is their a Java based client SDK for interacting with the Web APIs (& Push notifications)?
* Are there any ReST Web APIs?
** Currently I see their Push notifications supporting JSON (intput/output) but the other APIs accepting only XML.

[wogglepog]

These are great questions. I hope someone can answer at least some of them. The information in the documentation is really not sufficient to get an idea of how stuff like push notifications work.

[jasonbio]

Not sure how helpful this will be, but in regards to your payment API questions, I've had good results from taking the Roku store payment/billing system completely out of the equation and using another service instead. In specific, Stripe (https://stripe.com/), which is an extremely flexible payment processing system that is built for developers. There's a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the basics of how the Stripe API works down and once you integrate it into your systems, you'll find you have insight & control over all aspects of the billing cycle (payment, cancellation, refunds, disputes, etc.)

The only downside is that payments are handled out of the Roku channel, so you may run into some conversion rate problems because the user would need to manually enter their payment information elsewhere, but personally I haven't really noticed it. Just my thoughts.