Congratulations to the PHP community on its PHP 5.3 alpha 2 release in December. In roughly one month, there have been over 80,000 downloads of the alpha 2 release from unique IP addresses.
You can see that interest in PHP on Windows is growing significantly when you compare this to the 40,000 or so Windows downloads of PHP 5.2 alpha and beta combined over nearly five months.
One of the critical accomplishments in 5.3 has been updating the code base so that the core engine can be built under the latest version of Visual C (VC9). This update has enabled members of the community to focus on optimizing the PHP core to run on Windows. Already, with alpha 2, the release is proving itself to be a stable, robust implementation.
The community anticipates hitting general availability for 5.3 in the spring. Interest in that release is already running high and should continue to grow in the coming weeks.