If you are planning to write your first abalone program, you might
want to use abmove. It is a small library with a board representation,
and code for saving and loading games.
The code is very much alpha, and it has collected dust on my disk for
over a year now - so don't expect it to reach version 1.0 any time soon.
You can find it at
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=83427
Regards,
Peer