About the Author

Jayant Kumar is an experienced software professional and a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science, with more than 12 years' of experience in architecting and developing large-scale web applications.

Jayant is an expert on search technologies and PHP and has been working with Lucene and Solr for more than 10 years now. He has been the key person responsible for introducing Lucene as a search engine in www.naukri.com, the most successful job portal in India.

Jayant has played many different important roles throughout his career, including software developer, team leader, project manager, and architect, but his primary focus has been on building scalable solutions on the web. Currently, he is associated with the digital division of HT Media as the Chief Architect responsible for the job site www.shine.com.

Jayant is an avid blogger and his blog can be visited at http://jayant7k.blogspot.in. His LinkedIn profile is available at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jayantkumar.

I would like to thank the guys at Packt Publishing for giving me the opportunity to write this book. Special thanks to Yogesh, Suraj, and Amit for keeping me engaged and dealing with my drafts and providing feedback at all stages.

I would like to thank my wife Nidhi and my parents for taking care of our kids while I was engaged in writing the book. And finally, I would like to thank my kids, Ashlesha and Banhishikha, for bearing with me while I was writing this book.