Transactions on Big Data

Java 8 has introduced new capabilities such as lambda expressions and streams which simplify data-parallel computing. However, as a base language for Big Data systems, it still lacks a number of important capabilities such as processing very large datasets and distributing the computation over multiple machines. This paper gives an overview of the Java 8 Streams API and proposes extensions to allow its use in Big Data systems. It also shows how the API can be used to implement a range of standard Big Data paradigms. Finally, it compares performance with that of Hadoop and Spark. Despite being a proof-of-concept implementation, results indicate that it is a lightweight and efficient framework, comparable in performance to Hadoop and Spark, and is up to 5 times faster for the largest input sizes tested.