Jelly tags and files

As our Jenkins development experience progresses, we will need to incorporate user interface elements into our plugins. User interface interaction is implemented in Jenkins plugins through the use of jelly files. Jelly is a tag based UI implementation solution created by Apache, and provides a UI data-binding solution in Jenkins for plugin developers.

The core documentation for Jelly tags can be located on the Apache web site at:

http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-jelly/tags.html

The implementation of the Jelly solution in Jenkins adds a couple of conventions. The first is the entry field, which provides automatic data binding connections for the jelly entry field and the instance. The second is the implementation of data binding through the constructor. When the constructor is called it's automatically populated with data submitted from the form. To provide an example of this consider the following code snippets provided by the example Jenkins skeleton:

Config.jelly...