Submitted by Guy Saban on Wed, 10/26/2011 - 5:43am
There is now an Entity Contruction Kit which apparently does not require writing a module
http://drupal.org/project/eck
see also lullabot post:
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/module-monday-entity-construction-kit
And for Entity caching:
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/module-monday-entity-cache