Beginning Android 2

Chapter 6

Working with Containers

Containers pour a collection of widgets (and possibly child containers) into specific structures. If you want a form with labels on the left and fields on the right, you need a container. If you want OK and Cancel buttons to be beneath the rest of the form, next to one another, and flush to the right side of the screen, you need a container. Just from a pure XML perspective, if you have multiple widgets (beyond RadioButton widgets in a RadioGroup), you need a container just to have a root element to place the widgets inside.

Most GUI toolkits have some notion of layout management, frequently organized into containers. In Java/Swing, for example, you have layout managers like BoxLayout and containers that use ...