There’s a plethora of plug-ins for Jenkins, that’s well known. But there are way more modules in CPAN. One way to visualize all the modules in CPAN is with Map of CPAN.
The idea here is to create similar map for Jenkins plug-ins (Map of Jenkins plug-ins). It could use the plug-in type (plugin-labels) and show its growth through the time. That would be interesting, especially if it was possible to create a video (like this one below) showing what happened since the fork from Hudson.
Map of CPAN – The Movie from Grant McLean on Vimeo.
The code for the CPAN map generator is hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/grantm/cpan-map. And it uses the Hilbert curve for plotting those geometric forms.
Update 26, oct. 2012
The map generation is started with a Perl script cpan-map that downloads a tar.gz file from MetaCPAN and creates a map of namespaces and its modules. Then it creates an image with Hilbert curves. It assigns different colors for each namespace.
For Jenkins plug-ins map we could use update-center.json file, and group plug-ins by its label. We could get the author picture from Gravatar (like Map of CPAN), and use the same interface of Map of CPAN - it uses sammy.js and jQuery.
Links for Hilbert curves and Java