Matrix configuration with Jenkins pipelines

The Jenkins Pipeline plugin (aka Workflow) can be extended with other Multibranch plugins to build branches and pull requests automatically.

What would be the preferred way to run multiple configurations? For example, building with Java 7 and Java 8. This is often called matrix configuration (because of the multiple combinations such as language version, framework version, ...) or build variants.

I tried:

• executing them serially as separate stage steps. Good, but takes more time than necessary.
• executing them inside a parallel step, with or without nodes allocated inside them. Works but I cannot use the stage step inside parallel for known limitations on how it would be visualized.

Is there a recommended way to do this?

It seems like there is relief coming at least with the BlueOcean UI. Here is what I got (the tk-* nodes are the parallel steps):