Injection of autowired dependencies failed for abstract class

Question

I am using Spring 3 and Hibernate 4

I have the following class structure

public interface GenericDAO<T> {

    public void create(T entity);
    public void update(T entity);
    public void delete(T entity);
}

DAO class

public interface EmployeeDAO extends GenericDAO<Employee>  {

    public void findEmployee(EmployeeQueryData data);
}

DAO Implementation class

@Repository("employeeDAO")
public abstract class EmployeeDAOImpl implements EmployeeDAO {

protected EntityManager entityManager;

@Override
public void findEmployee(EmployeeQueryData data) {

...... code

}

The problem I am facing is when I try to deploy, I am getting the following exception. If I remove abstract from EmployeeDAOImpl and remove extends GenericDAO<Employee> from EmployeeDAO then application gets deployed without errors. So it is not possible to have abstract class for EmployeeDAOImpl or I have need to implement all methods of GenericDAO in DAO implementation without abstract?

Error creating bean with 
name 'employeeService': Injection of autowired dependencies failed; \
nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException:
Could not autowire field: test.dao.EmployeeDAO 
test.service.EmployeeServiceImpl.employeeDAO; nested exception is
org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: 
No matching bean of type [test.dao.EmployeeDAO] found for dependency: 
expected at least 1 bean which qualifies as autowire candidate for 
this dependency. Dependency annotations: 
{@javax.inject.Inject()}.

Edit 1

GenericDAOImpl

public class GenericDAOImpl<T> implements GenericDAO<T> {    

    public void create(T entity) {
    }       
    public void update(T entity) {
    }
    public void delete(T entity) {
    }

EmployeeDAOImpl

public class EmployeeDAOImpl extends GenericDAOImpl<Employee> implements EmployeeDAO {

Answer 1

Java (and consequently Spring) cannot create instances of abstract classes: every method must have an implementation before Java will let you create an instance, otherwise you would get a runtime error when you tried to call the method. You need to remove "abstract" from EmployeeDAOImpl and implement the methods inherited from GenericDAO.