Abstract
There exist numerous languages and frameworks that support an implementation of a variety of actor-based programming models in Java using concurrency utilities and threads. Java 8 is released with fundamental new features: lambda expressions and further dynamic invocation support. We show in this paper that such features in Java 8 allow for a high-level actor-based methodology for programming distributed systems which supports the programming to interfaces discipline. The embedding of our actor-based Java API is shallow in the sense that it abstracts from the actual thread-based deployment models. We further discuss different concurrent execution and thread-based deployment models and an extension of the API for its actual parallel and distributed implementation. We present briefly the results of a set of experiments which provide evidence of the potential impact of lambda expressions in Java 8 regarding the adoption of the actor concurrency model in large-scale distributed applications.
This paper is funded by the EU project FP7-610582 ENVISAGE: Engineering Virtualized Services, http://www.envisage-project.eu .
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Nobakht, B., de Boer, F.S. (2014). Programming with Actors in Java 8. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Specialized Techniques and Applications. ISoLA 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8803. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45231-8_4
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