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Modern Android App Development with Java

Layout

Explore how to create and manage Android layouts using ConstraintLayout and various views. Learn to define UI components in XML, center elements with constraints, and bind layouts and views to activities for interactive apps.

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Layout concept #

A layout defines the structure of the user interface. Layouts are built via views and view groups.

Views, sometimes also called “widgets,” represent interactable components such as:

  • TextView - component to render text
  • EditText - input field component where user can type text
  • Button - clickable text component with background

ViewGroups, sometimes also called “layouts,” represent invisible containers which define the position of its children on the screen. While Android SDK contains a number of view groups, which still can be used, Google not so long ago released a new view group called ConstraintLayout.

Visual representation of constrains
Visual representation of constrains

This layout comes as a separate library and uses constraints to position views on the screen. The ConstraintLayout is more complicated than Android SDK view groups, but it has a rich visual editor to help build the user interface and in most cases has better performance.

While we can create a layout in Java code, it’s easier to build a layout in the XML file and then inflate (bind) this layout to a specific activity. ...