In this code, we place a (vertical) box with two rectangles as child elements. It has a command line interface with which to act on those rectangles' size hints:

That should be self explanatory. Change those values (possibly resizing the box, which will resize together with the example's window) to get how size hints are honored by a container object, which in this case is the Evas box.

More on this smart object can be found on Evas box example. The full code for this example follows.