Java Programming

Hi Guyz..........i am new to designing applications............first i am onto design of applications that too on a new Struts.........as i am an old kind of guy who had exposure to simple jsps............now i have been told to design classes on Abstract Factory Pattern.
What i got from reading on the net....i wanted to clarify if my understanding is correct....this is the best pattern with high resuablitiy in it........what i got is........i will be having a abstract service class which will be dynamically loading my classes with class.forName(); based on the parameter sent by the action classes.Then those services will be used to perform activities.

I was asked to have one helper class for VO objects.This thing i did not understand.Can you guyz please advise me what are these helper classes.