10 years after the construction at LNL of its first superconducting resonator, the laboratory has become one of the leading centers in the development of low beta superconducting cavities, including superconducting rfqs. The technologies of bulk niobium, niobium sputtering and lead plating have been used and some of the innovations introduced in the field during the last decade have been developed at LNL. The present technology allows producing cavities that can reach more than 50 MV/m peak surface electric field, both in test cryostats and after installation in the linac. New techniques have been developed to minimize the resonators construction cost, like spinning of multicell cavities, modular design of quarter wave resonators and niobium sputtering on copper: these technologies have reached a high level of performance and reliability. A new technique of mechanical damping was developed for stabilization of large size quarter wave resonators. The lead plating technique was enriched by the stabilization of the lead surface against oxidation. The construction of the first superconducting rfq to be used in an accelerator facility, which required original solutions to the new kind of problems emerging from this project, is at an advanced stage. Recent results obtained at LNL show that the goal of operating superconducting low beta resonators at 8 MV/m in cw mode can be presently reached; future low beta linacs could be designed with an accelerating field which is about two times higher than the one required in the past, with a significant cost reduction that could make these machines affordable also for small laboratories. ©1999 American Institute of Physics.