Programming with Actors in Java 8

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.