The present invention provides a method and apparatus for developing enterprise applications using design patterns. Over time, different types of enterprise applications have been developed and implemented by various software developers for different purposes. The present invention determines the purpose of the software that is needed by the developer and obtains a design pattern to solve the problem that is in accord with the best practices and patterns derived from these implementations. In turn a developer can rely on the present invention as a tool to develop and implement applications in a three-tier or multi-tier computer architecture.