I've used recursion quite a lot on my many years of programming to solve simple problems, but I'm fully aware that sometimes you need iteration due to memory/speed problems.
So, sometime in the very far past I went to try and find if there existed any "pattern" or text-book way of transforming a common recursion approach to iteration and found nothing. Or at least nothing that I can remember it would help.
Usually, I replace a recursive algorithm by an iterative algorithm by pushing the parameters that would normally be passed to the recursive function onto a stack. In fact, you are replacing the program stack by one of your own.
var stack = [];
stack.push(firstObject);
// while not empty
while (stack.length) {
// Pop off end of stack.
obj = stack.pop();
// Do stuff.
// Push other objects on the stack as needed.
...
}
Note: if you have more than one recursive call inside and you want to preserve the order of the calls, you have to add them in the reverse order to the stack:
foo(first);
foo(second);
has to be replaced by
stack.push(second);
stack.push(first);
Edit: The article Stacks and Recursion Elimination (or Article Backup link) goes into more details on this subject.