One of the best UI clients for SVN we use is
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ which is only for Windows. I think Tigris also offer RapidSVN which is more platform independent.
I have come accross a PHP web application (sorry, I lost the link) that does SVN tasks like commit and update. It is fairly easy as you can execute command line functions from PHP using backticks. So you'll create an HTTP request to a "RESTful service" that will call the SVN via backticks and report back with the result. Or you could just send attributes as POST / GETS, interpret them with PHP and respond by making the appropriate SVN command line calls.
We're in the process of trying out CruiseControl with PHPUnderControl, which does
- building of PHPDocs
- Running unit tests and graphically displaying the results
- Checks coding standards and violations.
So there are apps with basic functionality. It would be nice to integrate even more, having the above, included in project management tools like VersionOne, which, if you're using Scrum, might even show the commits done for a particular sprint or task in a sprint.
I do agree, these features are to be kept separate from the actual project, it must perform all these required tasks non-intrusively.
Thanks for the replies!