Welcome to the JavaRanch, Alexsandar! Even though you've been here a while!
VPN and SSL aren't quite the same thing. On a VPN, you login once and the vpn interface wraps all of the cliient's outgoing traffic for that network in an ssh tunnel transparently. A lot of the time, the unwrapping of that network traffic is done by networking hardware, such as a Cisco router, so that back at the data center, the traffic is not encrypted on the LAN, just on the open Inernet.
With SSL/TLS, traffic is explicitly encrypted end-to-end, whether it's on the open Internet or in the LAN. The endpoint systems do the encryption and decryption. They also maintain their own private set of security credentials that are completely independent of any VPNs that their traffic might run through.
There's also a third option, which is "ssh tunnelling". This is a sort of poor person's VPN where only a single network port is encrypted using SSH. One of its most popular uses is to allow secure use of the X Window system on a remote client, since X works using (normally) unencrypted data on tcp/ip port 6000 and thus is a security risk, since it's how remote users can issue system commands and view data.
I routinely use ssh tunnelling to allow my local database support software to directly access databases in secure remote facilities.
