How to develop - Working locally and ftping to a remoter server

I am relatively new to web Development and am experimenting with various development methods.

I am currently developing in a bash shell using emacs on my external development server. I edit my fil开发者_运维知识库es and view the site on the development server.

At the end of the day I commit the changes that I have made to my repository.

I was wondering if it is possible to develop locally using aptana studio and when I save, the changes are automatically saved on my development server?(ftp?) This would give me the advantage of having a local version of the site on my computer and a copy on my development server plus the benifit of an IDE Is this possible? If is is possible what are the advantages and disadvantages?

aptana should have possibility to synchronize sources with a remote site, check options as I did not used it for a while (but that feature was useful).

Check other ides for plugins/possibilities also, I think that it should work well with php in netbeans too.

Aptana does support ftp connections see: Adding an ftp site

If you are looking to develop locally (and test locally too) I would recommend using XAMPP This would give you the ability to develop and test locally before ever having to send files to a server for testing. This could save you a lot of time as some IDEs I find take those few extra seconds when saving to a remote location as well as locally. It adds up!

If you have SSH access to the target webserver, give rsync, scp, and sshfs a look:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_copy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSHFS

( As a reminder, do not just copy, or check out, a revision control working copy on to a production web server. Too many security issues.)

Basically, what you want to do is generate a local copy of the site in your staging area, and then rsync (or scp) it to the production server.

But back to your question: SSHFS is a more seamless option, but you do need to ensure that your revision control files are not pushed up too.

If you must use FTP, that can be done too. Windows XP even has limited built-in support. It's called "network places".

Any of these options are probably preferable to an IDE built-in sync, since all changes will be pushed. (Even those you make manually in the system shell.)

Let me know if this helps... Good luck! :)