Part I, including Chapter 1, is dedicated to the overview of the technologies relevant to data-intensive Web application development. It proposes a guided tour of the key technical ingredients that make up a Web application, starting from HTTP and HTML, touching XML and the related standards and document transformation and query languages, addressing data connection technologies like ODBC and JDBC, and exposing the rationale behind a broad spectrum of technologies specifically designed to support the dynamic construction of pages, like CGI, Java Servlet and JSP, .NET.

The goal of this part of the book is not to give a working knowledge of the touched technologies, but to offer the reader a meditated compendium, which can be helpful for assessing the role of each piece of technology and for better understanding the future technical evolution.