Spoon is an amazing GUI for creating and executing Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) jobs and transformations. Sometimes though, the work you need to do is easier to be created or driven by code rather than by hand. This is where RoboChef comes in.

This is a small API that allows you to easily build, modify, and execute Kettle transformations using simple wrappers around the necessary Kettle classes, and optionally XML snippits that can be generated from within Spoon.