as i said prior, an NPE when accessing a @dependency field in salve
means the class has not been instrumented. if salve cannot find a
matching bean it will throw a DependencyNotFoundException, not return
a null. so i think you should get your instrumentation figured out
first.
as far as injecting a hashmap, what would happen if you replace
@dependency with @inject, would guice know how to inject it? if not
then salve wont either as it simply delegates the lookup to your ioc
container of choice.
-igor