Question: I created a maven project in eclipse. I uploaded it to my subversion server. Now on my testing server I installed maven and I want to connect it with my svn repository to run test builds on. Not sure how to do this since I have only worked with Maven via the eclipse plug-in.

Answer: 
I'm a little confused as to what you're really asking here. If you split your application up into different services running across the network, then data marshalling has to occur somewhere.

Having said that, have you investigated [OSGi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSGi) ? You can deploy different [bundles](http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-03-2008/jw-03-osgi1.html) (basically, jar files with additional metadata defining the interfaces) into the same OSGi server, and the server will facilitate communication between these bundles transparently, since everything is running within the same JVM - i.e. you call methods on objects in different bundles as you would normally. 

An OSGi server will permit unloading and upgrades of bundles at runtime and applications should run normally (if in a degraded fashion) provided the [OSGi bundle lifecycle](http://www.osgi.org/javadoc/r4v42/org/osgi/framework/Bundle.html) states are respected.
It sounds like your team has a manual QA process and the real issue is automating regression tests so that you can deploy new releases quickly and with confidence. Breaking up the code into separate servers is a workaround for that.

If you're willing to restart the server then one approach might be to compile the code into separate jar files, and deploy a module by dropping in a new jar and restarting. This is largely a matter of structuring your code base so that bad dependencies don't creep in and the calls between jars are made via interfaces that don't change. (Or alternately, use abstract classes so you can add a new method with a default implementation.) Your build system could help by making sure that separately deployed modules can only depend on common interfaces and anything else is a compile error. But note that your compiler isn't going to help you detect incompatibilities when you're swapping in jars that you didn't compile against, so I'm not sure this really avoids having a good QA process.

If you want to deploy new code without restarting the JVM then OSGI is the standard way to do that. (But one that I know little about.)