[vorg]

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}")
        }
    }
  }

The vocabulary and grammar in that script is quite complicated and people would rather be presented with the options for clicking on a web page. But perhaps you're promoting a particular software product?

[dripton]

GUIs are more discoverable than command lines. Text files are easier to save in version control. So it's common to have a system where the GUI hooks new users, but they eventually have enough configuration in it that the GUI is no longer a reasonable way to control it all, and they need a way to extract the information in a reasonable format. Hence the reason several Jenkins plugins have evolved to do that.