Solr / lucene search - how easy to use - which one?

I am creating a social site and for search want to try solr or lucene as I have very indepth searches required. Platform is PHP codeignitor and MySQL. However my php developers have 0 experience outside of PHP/MySQL. So before i make them implement this I need to know:

1) How easy or how much time would it normally take to setup and get it implemented?

2) Is there coding involved or is it ready out of the box? ( I know there will be some to link it with my system 开发者_运维问答objects)

3) Which one to use out of the two?

For your use, I would suggest Solr. To use Lucene, you will need in depth Java knowledge, where as with Solr, you don't necessarily need this.

Solr will be ready out of the box, but you will need to do some configuration to "describe" your search index. You need to configure it so that it understands what your documents look like, what fields within that document to search on, how to search them, etc. This does have a learning curve. However, it's not overly difficult. The time this takes is greatly affected by how complex you want your searches to be.

For simple searches, I would think a developer should be able to insert documents and perform searches within a week of starting with Solr. Depending on how in depth your searches are, a developer could spend weeks or months learning and fiddling to tweak things. However, the bulk of the work should be doable within a few weeks of concentrated effort.

For what it's worth, the wiki and mailing lists for Solr are great resources. AND the developers themselves are very responsive.

EDIT: The coding involved with Solr would be on the PHP side. You need to write something to put your data into the XML format that Solr needs to insert documents into it's index, as all of this is done via XML over HTTP.