Naming conventions and basic templates are the most overlooked software patterns, yet probably the most powerful.
Naming conventions enable software automation. For example, Java Beans framework is based on a simple naming convention for getters and setters. And canonical URLs in del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/tag/software take the user to the page that has all items tagged software.
Many social software utilise naming conventions in a similar way. For example, if your user name is johnsmith then likely your avatar is johnsmith.jpg and your rss feed is johnsmith.xml.
Naming conventions are also used in testing, for example JUnit automatically recognizes all the methods in the class that start with prefix test.
The templates are not C++ or Java language constructs. We're talking about template files that contain variables and then allow binding of objects, resolution, and rendering the result for the client.
Cold Fusion was one of the first to popularize templates for web applications. Java followed with JSPs, and recently Apache developed handy general purpose templating for Java called Velocity. PHP can be used as its own templating engine because it supports eval function (be careful with security). For XML programming it is standard to use XSL language to do templates.
From generation of HTML pages to sending standardized support emails, templates are an essential helper in any modern software system.
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