Basic explanation of Context in android

Question

"If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself." — Albert Einstein

After reading about a context on the android developer web site and various other places on the web I am still a bit fuzzy. In this line of code I am a bit confused what the parameter really means. I am not ashamed to get a 6 year old answer....

TextView textView = new TextView(getBaseContext());

Thanks

Answer 1

• Sea for a fish,
• sky for a bird,
• nest for a birdie,
• a rabbit hole for a rabbit,
• the space where a javax.swing.JComponent is drawn.

A context, is a way to describe the ether/environment an entity lives in and how to access other stuff living in this environment, interact with it.

:) First attempt of poetic answer for stack over flow ;)

At least, a 6 years old child would get the first four analogies.

More pragmatically, we can find different way to conceptualize what a context is, but it remains what the methods of this interface can offer as a set of services.