So I got down to day 2 of the of the IJTC conference, which was on in the  Cineworld Complex Parnell Street, Dublin. It's pretty cool having a conference in a cinema ;). Stephen Farrell, NewBay's chief technologist was giving a talk we put together on scaling Java systems for mobile web. I was there for Q&A at the end. The slides are here (or will be), but the short version is this: use a physical two-tier setup, manage state by cutting out middleware, manage database access, deploy JMS, everyone needs search and Java has the best search tech outside the search engines themselves, think hard about security sooner rather than later. Structurally it seems that high scale Java systems are looking like the "lightweight JEE" designs that have evolved over the last half-decade; except that lightweght JEE came about to manage the sheer complexity of enterprise projects rather than manage scale. Ironic or not, it seems that modern JEE stacks are converging to a LAMP style, either to manage complexity or to scale out.

I think some people in the talk were surprised at the user and data volumes and overall growth in the mobile space; it doesn't get as much press as Web2.0 and Social Networking. This year something like a billion phones will be sold, by comparison about a quarter of a million PCs will be made. Somewhere around 2010, there willl be 4 billion subscription plans.

I was sitting near James Strachan beforehand, now of IONA, but it looked like he was prepping (as were we) so I left him to it. Hi James ;) In the foyer, I heard good things about the Hibernate search, SOA, Sun SPOT, Grails and JPA presentations. After the talk, we got to chat with Luan O'Carroll of Xeotrope one of the conference organisers. It's a ton of underappreciated work; I think they've done a great job both organising and getting speakers. Here's hoping it will become an institution.

If you're headling down tomorrow, here's what's on:

• Life and Death Business Rules using JBoss jBPM by Paul Browne
• Filthy Rich Clients by Richard Bair
• Enterprise Messaging With Apache ActiveMQ by James Strachan
• JBoss Drools (Rules) by Mark Proctor
• Optimising Microsoft SQL Server on the Java Platform by Bob Duffy
• Scripting with Balance in Design and Performance by Dejan Bosanac
• Application lifecycle management in a Java/.NET environment by Ronan Geraghty
• Eclipse STP: SOA Tools Platform Project by Adrian Skehill