sockets, workers, connectionless and server-sent events

[DaveC426913]

I'm looking maximize power savings on mobile devices in regards to client-server communications. My research has turned up the above items as potentials.

w3.org and most other sites have either a very high-level two paragraph notes on the subjects, or very low-level notes on how to actually code them. I'm looking for some things in between high and low level (such as performance characteristics) that will give me ideas about which will give me the best results.

Can anyone give me a shove in the right direction?

[zcorpan]

It depends on what you're trying to do. Workers isn't client-server communication at all. "Connectionless" is an implementation detail about server-sent events that you can't control yourself as a web developer (just like you can't control whether the user uses a full browser in the mobile or uses a server side browser and a thin client ala Opera Mini).

As for performance, if you need continuous communicate in both directions with low overhead then websockets is probably best choice. If you need continuous communication from server to client but no or seldom communication from client to server then SSE+XHR is likely good enough (or could be better than websockets if the client supports connectionless SSE).