The present invention provides a method, system, and computer program product for caching objects to improve performance and resource utilization of software applications which interact with a back-end data source, such as a legacy host application and/or legacy host data store or database. Read-only requests for information are satisfied from the cache, avoiding the overhead of a network round-trip and the computing overhead of repeating an interaction with the back-end data source. Refreshes of cached objects and update requests to objects may be queued for delayed processing (for example, at a time when the system is lightly loaded), thereby improving system resource utilization. A sequence of actions that may be required to initiate, and interact with, the refresh and update processes is also preferably stored in the cached objects. This technique is applicant-independent, and may therefore be used for objects having an arbitrary format.