Increasingly, e-business sites rely on dynamic contents usually stored in database because a muchwider range of interaction than static HTML pages is achievable. Web applications generatingpages at runtime, can significantly increase their flexibility in delivering page content meetingmore demanding requirements. Data-intensive web applications are conveniently described as ahybrid between hypermedia and an information system [17]. Due to this twofold nature, data-intensive web applications require specialised techniques to integrate database technology andweb engineering in the same software process. Differently from traditional software systems, webapplications development introduces new challenges [17, 24]: web applications need to take intoaccount cognitive and aesthetic aspects, producing a high level of graphical quality, to handle andlink together hyper-documents, to analyse navigational information and to handle data in differentformats and with different nature. Different approaches have been proposed which can be groupedaccording to the following categories:• language-centric, page generators which merge together programming constructs and (todifferent extents) native support to the web domain (for instance, ASP [33], JSP [37], andPHP [1, 2]), whose chief function is to extract content from data sources at run-time, andinclude it into page templates; although, such systems are productive tools they seem to1.
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