In our plugin Warper, we will need to save the Bukkit locations. Locations are not serializable themselves. Serialization is the process of translating data or objects into a form that can be written to a file. We will make our own class that holds the Bukkit Location data and is able to convert it to and from a map of strings to objects that are serializable. If you are new to maps, they are a very useful type of collection that we will use throughout this project. Maps have keys and values. Each key points to a specific value. This Warper plugin is a good example of how maps can be used. When teleporting, a player will choose a specific location to warp to by name. If all of the warp locations were in a list, we would have to iterate through the list until the correct one is found. With a map, we would pass the key, which in our case is the name of the warp, to the map, and it would return the value, which is the warp location.
Create a new class...