I would like to begin this special series in the run-up to AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October with one of the most useful and commonplace patterns in my code. Arguably, this can be considered a feature of the JavaScript language rather than a design pattern; however, when considering the contexts in which it is applied, I regard it as a pattern. Self-invocation (also known as auto-invocation) is when a function executes immediately upon it’s definition. This is a core pattern and serves as the foundation for many other patterns of JavaScript development.