  We present a protocol to create entangled coherent states by engineering
cross-Kerr interactions between bosonic systems endowed with (externally
driven) internal spin-like degrees of freedom. With slight modifications, the
protocol is also able to produce N00N states through nonlinear beam splitter
interactions. Each bosonic system interacts locally with its spin and by
suitably tuning the model parameters, various classes of effective bosonic
interaction Hamiltonians, mediated by the coupled spins, can be engineered. Our
approach is benchmarked by numerical simulations aimed at studying the
entanglement within a bosonic register and comparing it with the expected one
resulting from the target Hamiltonians.
