Beginning Android 4

Chapter 10

Working with Containers

A container pours a collection of widgets (and possibly child containers) into a specific structure of your choosing. 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 in which to place the widgets.

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