plutus-starter VS cbor-java

This is pretty bad advice - you might not need a node to write dapps, but you'll sure as hell want a local Plutus dev environment for the smoothest experience. Take it from someone with an M1 - the setup process is a pain, compile times are poor, and it'll be difficult to get your language server up and running for proper syntax highlighting. Some repos like https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-starter don't seem to work even when Nix is configured to run it on Rosetta 2. Like the other commenter, I've resigned myself to ssh tunneling into a development Linux NUC, which has its own annoyances.

This what you wanted? https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus-starter

I love how the Cardano devs are making Plutus Dev Env as easy as possible to install and use. Just install Docker on your OS and:

Feel free to check the Cardano starter example project on Github

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.