In this chapter, we finally shifted our focus away from the backend and towards the frontend – getting an in-depth look at ways we can bind our data to the user interface. Of course, users can interact with data in numerous ways, but by far the most common is through a ListView.

ListViews and ListActivities are convenient classes which allow us to bind ListAdapters to the Activity and subsequently to the list layouts, handling events such as when a user touches a row in the list. ListAdapters are then classes which take in the underlying data and handle the binding process for you – namely, that as your list scrolls up and down you don't need to keep track of the position in the list; all that is done for you behind the scenes. Instead, all you need to do is choose which ListAdapter to use depending on the type of underlying data you have, and specify how you want the binding to occur.

Equipped with these ListAdapters, we were able to recreate a stripped-down version of our contact list and, more importantly, were given a taste for all of the ways we could take our data and display it in interactive, beautiful ways.

We finished off the chapter thinking about the use cases between each subclass of ListAdapters (seeing in total three different subclasses, the CursorAdapter, the BaseAdapter, and lastly the ArrayAdapter) and again, the hope is to build intuition into both the backend and frontend application design process.

In the next chapter, we'll continue our brainstorming and try to pull together everything that we've seen – walking through a handful of practical examples and discussing ways we could design our backend and frontend to implement those examples.