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Programming with Actors in Java 8

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Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Specialized Techniques and Applications (ISoLA 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8803))

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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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leiden Advanced Institute of Computer Science, Leiden University, The Netherlands

    Behrooz Nobakht

  2. SDL Fredhopper, UK

    Behrooz Nobakht

  3. Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica, The Netherlands

    Frank S. de Boer

Authors
  1. Behrooz Nobakht
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  2. Frank S. de Boer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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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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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45231-8_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-45230-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-45231-8

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