There is still no public "development preview" or alpha release, but that doesn't mean we can't play around with it, report bugs, ensuring our apps still properly work with it etc etc etc. It is however a bit annoying needing to "go old-school" and fetch a snapshot and build it yourself though.

If you'd like to try it out for yourself (the generated Ubuntu packages), you can get more information over on the Launchpad page for the project. As always, feedback is welcome on the PHP internals list about your experiences.

Launchpad makes it really easy to provide your own custom packages, and even has a vast build farm to build packages automatically for different architectures and different Ubuntu releases. The only down side is it doesn't build rpm packages.. Thats fine by me, but that would be really useful for those wishing to deploy on a RedHat based distro.

He took the current package and pulled out a lot of the setup to make a "vanilla" installation. You can then look over at the PHP 5.3 PPA he's provided on his Launchpad account and grab this most up to date package.