Very often we work on projects that are hosted on a remote server. There are multiple ways to work on the remote files:
1. ssh into the remote machine and use an editor like vi or emacs to edit the files
2. Develop on your local machine and FTP every change
The second choice is preferable if you want to use an IDE or if the conenction to the server is slow.
However, there is a 3rd approach, that combines the above two. If you are using Eclipse or NetBeans as your editor, then you can connect your editor to the remote server over FTP. I will only cover Eclipse since that is what I use. Read more »