I had looked into this myself as I wanted my FTDI 232 cable to always appear as /dev/boarduino.
I found that I could get the port to show up in Arduino's Serial menu by manually adding 'boarduino' to the list of device names in RXTXCommDriver.java (starting at line 519 for version 2.1.9). Of course this means that I had to compile RXTX myself.
In the end I decided not to complicate my installation and went back to using precompiled RXTX files from the rxtx.org site.
On reading the INSTALL file you could try using
java -Dgnu.io.rxtx.SerialPorts=/dev/tts/USB com.foo.MyApp
where com.foo.MyApp is the arduino java app.
DISCLAIMER: I haven't tried this so have no idea if it will work for you
HTH
Ver
Regards