I often have nothing more than an FTP access to a server on which the application is placed.
What I usually use now is ‘Keeping remote directory up to date’ feature of WinSCP. Files of the local copy (in theory at least) keep being uploaded to a remote server as soon as they get saved and then all I need is to refresh a page in a browser to see the result (sometimes clearing session variables beforehand).
WinSCP’s bugginess and FTP protocol deficiencies aside, I feel this may be somewhat primitive approach and perphaps there are better ways to get a task like that done.
I have a similar situation. I used to use Dreamweaver for web development but have switched to other tools that do not have the file sync features of Dreamweaver.
I have recently discovered BeyondCompare, which is a diff/merge tool that works really well for comparing local and remote directory trees. It is highly configurable and has a sync mode as well. Very nice.