Update March 2018
This answer is now quite old, and since it was written systemd has won the pid1 war on Linux. Thus, you should probably create a systemd unit, if systemd is built in to your distribution (which is most of them).
Answer below is preserved for posterity.
The monit answer above is valid, but I thought I'd mention some alternatives:
It's worth bearing in mind that your operating system has already solved the process management problem. Traditionally, Linux has used sysvinit, which is basically the collection of scripts you see in init.d. However it's pretty dumb and can not monitor processes, init.d scripts are complicated and it's being replaced for good reason.
More modern operating systems are starting to replace sysvinit, and the frontrunners are Upstart and Systemd. Debian is leaning towards systemd, Ubuntu developed and has pretty much already transitioned to Upstart, and like Debian Redhat/CentOS/Fedora are moving towards systemd. Thus if you use an OS that has already replaced sysvinit I would recommend using what's built-in. The scripts are much easier to write than init scripts.
I have used runit and quite like it, but the easiest to use is supervisor. It's also very well documented, works almost anywhere and is packaged in all the major distributions.
But whatever you do, please, please, PLEASE do not use a shell script. There are so many things wrong with that approach!
alerts
you to something not working.restarted
whenever it stopped, for any reason. No problem with restarting.