Both are meant to decouple the implementation complexities from an interface.

The Business Delegate decouples some Entity Beans or other distributed objects from a Web Interface.

The Session Facade uses a session bean to coordinate the flow of other objects.

Both gather together workflows and present a single interface for it.

Gosh, Sun likes to complicate things by doing a "bag-em tag-em" trick to differentiate the slightest differences.

Design patterns are not meant to be an end-all-be-all for project design, but are meant to be a means of communicating the maximum amount of information in the minimum amount of words. And also, they are meant to be a guide so a person isn't having to totally re-invent the wheel when you program.

Anything beyond that is pedantry

Stephen McConnell