ssh

At last! The answer to a persistent problem that's been stymying my Drupal 5 efforts. First, some brief background for the non-techies:

A very common way of developing code for use on the web is to run a local copy of the site on your own machine's webserver while tunneling traffic to a central development database. The dev writes his code and saves it on his machine. He then points his web browser at his own machine. The web server picks up the request and runs the code. Whenever it needs to talk to the database, it does so by talking to a central DB server over an encrypted tunnel. This is made possible by SSH, a handy program that can let you securely pipe TCP traffic between servers like magic.

This is useful because when multiple people are working on a site, it's important to be able to combine their work while simultaneously preventing them from stepping on one another's toes. There are a number of well-developed tools for combining files within a project (we use Subversion). But it's very hard to have people work on separate copies of a database and then combine their work into something useful. It's much easier to just have everyone work off the same development database. It's also not as big a deal, because if someone makes an incorrect change to the database it's generally less likely to negatively affect other developers (well, unless they did something really unwise). Tunneling makes it easy for devs to keep their code separate and their databases unified.