code comparing... (?)

fatnjazzy

Hi, i have a huge problem.
I am a developer of a website which contains 25,000 visitors per day.
im working on this website full time job.
the website contains 4 different API with special certificate for each one, because of that and other things, i cant develop locally (only by remote ftp with the editor).

what i do is i create a subdomain and copy the content of the domain inside it, i develop for 2-3 days, and after that im updating the website (the original domain) by FTP program,

if i use ftp to update the website, the visitors will see half page or nothing until the update of the file will be done.
i need to compare the files and see the changes before i update.

if ill update the website by using shell command, no body will know that the site is updated because it happens locally.
i need a decent GUI (for linux/XP) to compare the files and control the changes. i need to see exatly what im releasing to the live site
the gui will have to connect the the remote shell and do the job.

Here you can see a perfect tool that does it all but unfortunately its FTP based:
http://scootersoftware.com/moreinfo.php

i have installed on my server rsync, diff, svn and others.

Linux contains lots of tools like that but its only local to loca or local to remote. i didnt find remote to remote tool,
please help
thanks

etully

In my opinion, you need to hire a consultant to help you design a solution to your problem. There is no piece of software (gui, shell, local, remote, whatever) that is going to solve your problem.

Your problem is not unique - people have been dealing with those sorts of problems since the 1970's - and there are lots of good tools out there to help you. Simply making something a gui doesn't make it better.

I can think of a half dozen ways to make your problem disappear and none of them involve anything any more complicated or sophisticated than what you already have. For example, you could use the following process to develop and publish your site on a remote server where FTP is your only tool:

find the HTDOCS directory and make a complete copy of your web site in a parallel directory called HTDOCS-DEV or something like that.
Do all your development and testing on the DEV directory.
When you are happy with it, change the filename of the HTDOCS directory to HTDOCS-OLD and change the HTDOCS-DEV directory to HTDOCS. This will take you about 10 seconds so there will be a small gap where your site will be inaccessible but that sounds like it's better than what you have now. If the new site is no good for some reason, you can back out by changing the filenames back to the way they were.
When you are confident that the new site is stable, you can copy the HTDOCS directory into HTDOCS-OLD and rename the OLD directory to HTDOCS-DEV and you can return to step 2.

That's just one possible solution. There are lots of others that don't need any sophisticated version control software. Don't get me wrong, you can use some version control software if you want to (and it's good stuff) but software alone isn't going to solve your process problem.

fatnjazzy

Hello and thanks for your answer..
As far as I understand, i can take a tool such as MELD or something else and convert its code to compare remote to remote.

Or i can Develop by using php (with ssh2 package) a tool that will connect in a tunnel and do some shell scripting to compare files and update the remote site in shell_exac (with commands such as CP TAR and so).

I dont have a time to develop that this is the reason that i asked that.
i know that there are lots of tools that doing almost that.
Thanks