It seems you want to do all things right at your first time.
It's not easy or good, you know.
The J2EE patterns have little relation to GOF patterns. So you can learn them respectively.
But GOF patterns are most popular, important, classic things
you should learn them after several years experience of programming.
For a web application, you can achieve it without any patterns, and of course can do it with a lot of patterns ,this's not certain.
But I think most dangerous things is using patterns you don't grasp.
[ January 15, 2007: Message edited by: Lucas Lee ]