plutus-pioneer-program VS cbor-java

If you want an easy entry into Plutus and Cardano smart contracts take a look at https://demeter.run/ and plutus pioneer program cohort 4 content

and the course materials, including assignments and HW are updated weekly here: https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-pioneer-program

Step Three: learn Plutus. Check out the Plutus Pioneer Program.

GitHub repo

There's a little more to it than cloning an existing repo and installing it somewhere. I think the very first thing you should do is go through the pioneers program. https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-pioneer-program

What's the pros and cons of this versus CBOR, which we had great success with in our system.

https://cbor.io

CBOR (Concise Binary Object Representation) is a codec for small JSON object, similar to MessagePack but in the internet standard.

JSON is a simple key=value pair representation. If you want to implement it by your hand with the same set of features (maps, lists, character escaping) then you will get something really similar. They are binary alternatives like https://cbor.io/ , but they are not popular for same reasons we use human readable representation of data for any other use case in programming

CBOR

Maybe this? http://cbor.io/ Haven't used it personally but I've read good things about it and the documentation makes sense.

go-cose is the Go implementation of COSE. COSE is a signing and encryption format based on the Concise Binary Object Representation format (CBOR). While inspired by the needs of the IoT community including fast processing on low-memory devices, the format is broadly applicable from small devices to large-scale server environments. COSE has incorporated lessons learned from Javascript Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) efforts including JSON Web Signature (JWS) and JSON Web Token (JWT).

Have a look at cbor, https://cbor.io/ It's very compact and works wonderfully for embedded devices. Works identical to Json but than for binary data.

You could also look into CBOR serialization format. It's less readable but it's much more efficient than JSON.