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I'm building a Java application that is some sort of Android applications (APK files) analyzer.

One of the main features that the app will offer is a "preview" of an Android layout, hence I need an API that receives an Android layout XML and a few configuration arguments such as screen resolution and theme, and returns the rendered layout as it would appear on a device running the application (graphical consistency with the real Android platform is important) along with position data of the View objects (in order to allow the user to select a view by clicking it). At the first stage, I don't expect the feature to reflect layout changes that are made programmatically, but only the View objects and resource graphics defined in the XML.

The idea I have in mind is to use the source code of a layout editor, such as ADT's editor or DroidDraw, and integrate it into my framework, but then I was wondering - maybe a better way would be to use the android API itself to render the layout for me (this is better mainly because I won't need to rewrite my code for later versions of the OS).

So my question is: does the API allows such operations? Or is there an even better way?

Any suggestions and insights are welcomed :)

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does the API allows such operations?

If by "java application" you mean an app that runs on your PC, then no. There's no straightforward way to even call anything in the Android API. I'd recommend you go with the first approach of integrating some existing source code.

That said, this is not a straightforward task either. Also, if you're analyzing an APK, you'll be working with binary XML files, not the easy-to-read plain text ones that you see when developing (which assumedly are what ADT/DroidDraw use). There may be source code out there to deal with that too.

You could also consider looking at the source for Android itself, but I imagine you'd have to re-implement a bunch of rendering code, so that's no easy way out either.

At the first stage, I don't expect the feature to reflect layout changes that are made programmatically, but only the View objects and resource graphics defined in the XML.

Reflecting the layout changes made programmatically will be virtually impossible to do in a reasonable way.

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Thanks for the detailed answer. Yes, I do mean an application running on PC. As for decompiling the binary XML - I already solved this issue, and I have a directory including all layouts and other resources in source format.
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This task is definitely possible, however, it's not straightforward at all. I would suggest taking a look and Android Studio's source code, more specifically there is a tool called LayoutLib.

This is the tool that the IDE's layout preview/editor uses to render layouts. You can use this to render layouts and views that you have the source code for. Unfortunately, it's not very well documented, so you have to figure out the usage from IDE's sources.

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The open source Itsnat has a way to render loaded XML Android Layout files directly. it has a sample app that compares the standard (binary compiled) versions with the dynamic. My work with it shows that it does a good job reproducing all the quirks of LinearLayout/Relativelayout, etc. https://github.com/jmarranz/itsnat

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