Eclipse will give you this warning if you are using Generic HashMap using Java 5 or later.
See also: “Lesson Lesson” in Sun Java Tutorials.
Edit: Actually, here I will also give an example:
Say I want to label someone with my object Person:
Map<String, Person> map = new HashMap<String, Person>();
They are checked at compile time; type information is lost at runtime due to the way Java implements Generics.