views: Views are the part of the page that is unique to the action being run. They form the meat of your application’s response.
elements: smaller, reusable bits of view code. Elements are usually rendered inside views.
layouts: view files that contain presentational code that wraps many interfaces in your application. Most views are rendered inside a layout.
helpers: these classes encapsulate view logic that is needed in many places in the view layer. Among other things, helpers in CakePHP can help you build forms, build AJAX functionality, paginate model data, or serve RSS feeds.