What is a Design Pattern?

A Design Pattern is essentially a description of a commonly occurring object-oriented design problem and how to solve it. Part of the idea of Design Patterns is that patterns have a certain literary form. In the GoF book, patterns typically have these (major) elements: Intent Motivation Applicability Structure Participants Collaborations Consequences Implementation Sample Code Known Uses Related Patterns
Part of the benefit of patterns rises from the discipline of having to

J2EE:
Java EE (Enterprise Edition): Formerly J2EE (see above). It includes Java Standard Edition plus most of the other Java technologies including JavaMail, Activation, JAXB (Java API for XML Binding), Servlets, JSF (Java Server Faces), JMS (Java Messaging Service), EJB (Enterprise Java Beans), and others. Most of the APIs are very component-oriented and are intended to provide pluggable interfaces for business components to form robust, distributed internet applications. Distributed Applications Distributed Applications are software systems running on two or more computers in a computer network.

Where classic software systems of the past century were mostly based on Client server models and Client-centric application development, both ultimately run on one single computer, be it the client computer or the server. With the introduction of Intelligent agents, Web APIs and Web 2.0 and the emergence of Cloud computing more and more "multiple machine" approaches emerge, where many systems on several locations can take care of Load balancing (computing) by re-distribution of specific tasks, or where each of these machines serves a specific purpose or task.
Advantages of application servers
Data and code integrity By centralizing business logic on an individual server or on a small number of server machines, updates and upgrades to the application for all users can be guaranteed. There is no risk of old versions of the application accessing or manipulating data in an older, incompatible manner. Centralized configuration Changes to the application configuration, such as a move of database server, or system settings, can take place centrally. Security A central point through which service-providers can manage access to data and portions of the application itself counts as a security benefit, devolving responsibility for authentication away from the potentially insecure client layer without exposing the database layer. Performance By limiting the network traffic to performance-tier traffic the clientserver model improves the performance of large applications in heavy usage environments. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) In combination, the benefits above may result in cost savings to an organization developing enterprise applications. In practice, however, the technical challenges of writing software that conforms to that paradigm, combined with the need for software distribution to distribute client code, somewhat negate these benefits.
[citation needed] [citation needed]

Transaction Support A transaction represents a unit of activity in which many updates to resources (on the same or distributed data sources) can be made atomic (as an indivisible unit of work). End-users can benefit from a system-wide standard behaviour, from reduced time to develop, and from reduced costs. As the server does a lot of the tedious code-generation, developers can focus on business logic