Subversion web development question.

[Greg Groth]

Forgive me if this question is stupid or has been answered before, more 
than likely this info exists, but I'm not looking in the right place.  I 
work in a small corporation that is heavily dependent on web apps in 
which I am the sole developer.  Currently we're using ASP on Win2K with 
SQL Server 2000.  We've used RedHat for years on our mail / DNS servers, 
and have migrated to FreeBSD for both.  Since ASP has pretty much been 
rendered obsolete by .Net, we are eventually going to migrate our web 
apps.  Rather than continue down the road of MS technology, we have 
decided to migrate to PHP & MySQL based on the stability we've 
experienced with FreeBSD running mail and DNS.  I've done my homework in 
this regard, and the needed functionality for our needs exists in PHP, 
and I am in the process of setting up a development server to start the 
process of recoding the apps.

Our development infrastructure to date works in this manner.  Since I am 
the sole developer, and will be for the long term future, there has 
never been any real need to incorporate SourceSafe.  Instead we run a 
separate development server to do all the coding.  An FTP site has been 
set up to repository on the server.  I currently use HomeSite for it's 
built-in FTP client.  Coding is done locally, saved back to the server, 
and tested on the server in a browser.  Testing is not done locally 
because our needs are such that there is a large number of static text 
files need to be accessed by our apps.  The parameters to access these 
files are hard to duplicate to a workstation, and it has proved (for us 
anyway) to be easier to test these apps on a server that is a mirrored 
environment of the live server.

My question is can something like this be replicated on FreeBSD w/ 
Subversion?  I would like to setup a versioning system, but am at a loss 
on how the development process would operate.  I have found information 
on how to update files on the live server from the development server, 
but not much in the way of how to set up a development server to get 
Subversion to update the files in the Apache directories.  It would be 
trivial for me to simply set up FTP sites that map to the Apache 
directories, and change the permission structure to allow access to 
these directories, but I'd rather not create a security headache for 
myself down the road.  Can Subversion be set up to check out a file, 
commit it back to the server, and test it in a browser from a 
workstation?  Or does the file need to be moved from the Subversion 
directories to the Apache directories by someone w/ root privileges 
every time a file has been edited?

Sorry if this question has been answered somewhere else, it's just that 
most of the info I seem to be finding is based on application 
development for locally run binaries in which the app is tested locally 
before being committed back to the server.

Best regards,
Greg Groth