Search⌘ K
AI Features
Home
Courses
Modern Android App Development with Kotlin

Layout

Explore how to create and manage Android user interfaces by building layouts with ConstraintLayout in XML. Understand view groups and views, including TextView and Button, and learn manual and automatic view binding techniques in Kotlin to connect UI components with your code for interactive applications.

We'll cover the following...

Layout concept

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

Views, also sometimes 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 that define the position of its children on the screen. While Android SDK contains a number of view groups, which still can be used, Google recently released a new view group called ConstraintLayout.

This layout comes as a separate library and uses constraints to position views on the screen. 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.

Building layout

Let’s try to create a layout with the “Hello World” text in the middle of the screen.

First, create a new ...