Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with all this. Unfortunately I haven't found anything less bad :(
Jenkins + the Job DSL Plugin [0] has been amazing. We don't do any configuration in the web interface, instead everything lives in a groovy file on BitBucket. Every time we push a change Jenkins grabs it and auto runs the groovy file, regenerating all of our jobs. We have it set up so that a job is created for every branch in our repo, so much easier to work with. All a developer has to do to get his branch building…
You only need recognition-memory to use Web and GUI interfaces, whereas you need recall-memory to use command line interfaces and scripts, which is far more difficult. That's why clicking in a Web GUI or graphical XML-generator replaced scripting. You need a lot of previous information in your memory for recall to write stuff like the following example taken from your linked page:
def project = 'quidryan/aws-sdk-test'
def branchApi = new URL("https://api.github.com/repos/${project}/branches")
def branches = new groovy.json.JsonSlurper().parse(branchApi.newReader())
branches.each {
def branchName = it.name
job {
name "${project}-${branchName}".replaceAll('/','-')
scm {
git("git://github.com/${project}.git", branchName)
}
steps {
maven("test -Dproject.name=${project}/${branchName}")
}
}
}