Feature Request: Support binary serialization formats beyond JSON

[svet-b]

While JSON serialization is quite common, it's far from the only payload (serialization) format that is commonly used. In fact, it's quite a poor format for IoT and similar data that often gets transferred over MQTT - therefore many systems use other, more compact and more performant, formats. These are generally binary formats that are not human-readable.

In light of this, it would be great to allow for other (common) binary formats to be inspected in a similar user-readable fashion inside MQTT Explorer. The most common ones are likely to be the following, split into two categories:

Schema-less

These can usually be mapped directly to JSON-like payloads via existing libraries. I.e. development effort to support should therefore be more limited:

• CBOR (the one we use, and the reason I'm creating this feature; CBOR is also the only format apart from JSON that's officially supported by AWS IoT)
• MsgPack (similar to CBOR)
• Gzipped JSON (existing feature request https://github.com/thomasnordquist/MQTT-Explorer/issues/506)

Schema-based

These can be mapped to JSON-like payloads based on schema. Given the need to register the schema in MQTT Explorer, the development effort to support these may be a bit higher:

• Apache Avro (existing feature request https://github.com/thomasnordquist/MQTT-Explorer/issues/195)
• Protocol Buffers
• Thrift Protobufs and Thrift are mostly used in the context of RPC, so may be less relevant in the MQTT context, but I figured I'd add them just to give a sense of the landscape.

Either way, I thought I'd create this issue in order to gauge the interest in (and likelihood of) having this be implemented.

[msqr]

I would also like to voice my interest in CBOR support. Thanks for all the effort that has gone into this app!