There's certainly nothing stopping you from doing Ruby or JS dev work on a remote server. I run Windows on my laptop, so when I wanted to start contributing to Discourse on the side a few months ago, I ordered a VPS at DigitalOcean and did my work there over SSH. I used SSH tunneling to access the dev HTTP server.
I’ve done similar things with pycharm. I can run pycharm locally but run a remote python process. .py files are automatically uploaded and I can debug over the network just fine. I know eclipse, and presumsbly others, can do the same.
Edit: It helps that I use vim as my editor.