For Cordova apps, I start development locally on my machine with Chrome. I have to run Chrome with disabled security (allowing cross origin).
On OSX, you can run Chrome with security disabled by running the following terminal command (make sure Chrome is fully closed first).
/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --disable-web-security --allow-file-access-from-files
Once I get to a point where I need to start integrating Cordova Plugins, I then build out the Cordova project and test with an Android tablet (the Android emulator is horrible). For remote web debugging on Android, I use weinre.
I never personally build out or test my code on a web server, it's always local on my desktop or mobile device. I make all web service calls via jQuery's Ajax.