All this talk about MS dropping J++ has started me thinking about what JAVA is. Can anyone answer a few questions?

(1) Can JAVA code be compiled to a WIN EXE to create desktop applications?
(2) Why is JAVA said to be slow?
(3) Can you use ActiveX controls in JAVA? ADO?
(4) Can a JAVA application call methods on a VFP COM server?
(5) Can you create COM objects with JAVA?
(6) In a web browser, does JAVA and client side scripting do the same things (i.e, run code to respond to DHTML events)?

Thanx,
Charlie