Question

I was reading an article about Javascript’s best practices, and kinda got confused about which function structure to use…

I guess it might have an impact on the scope of the variables and functions, but which one of these structures would you use (and which is considered the best practice)?

Structure 1: use the object literals.

var obj1 = {
    _myvar : 'myval',

 init: function() {
  this.function1();
  this.function2();
 },

 function1: function() {
  alert('function1');
 },

 function2: function() {
  alert('function2');
 }
};
obj1.init();

Structure 2: Wrap the code in an auto-executing function.

(function(){
 var _myvar = 'myval',

 function1 = function() {
  alert('function1');
 },

 function2 = function() {
  alert('function2');
 },

 init = (function() {
  function1();
  function2();
 }) (); 
}) ();

Answer 1

You use the self-executing anonymous function when you don’t want others to interfere with your code and/or don’t want to use any global variable. If you might want to use those functions/objects/whatever somewhere else, you would want to use the first one.