Although it’s been around for a while, we're seeing more and more use cases where using the CBOR specification for data interchange makes sense — especially in environments containing multiple types of applications communicating with one another: service to service, browser to service, and so on. One thing we've found useful with Borer, a Scala implementation of a CBOR encoder/decoder, is the ability for clients to negotiate content between the binary representation and plain old JSON format. It's quite useful to have a text version viewable in a browser as well as the concise binary format. We foresee CBOR/JSON bilingual protocols picking up in popularity with the continuing rise of IoT and edge computing and other situations where the environment is tightly constrained.
