process monitor and restart utility

[robertlaferla at comcast.net (Robert La Ferla)]

I am looking for a utility that essentially keeps a list of processes to 
monitor (in a flat file much like crontab) and restarts them if they 
crash (or fail to respond to some condition like a http get).  However, 
I'd also like it to provide an optional notification of the 
crash/restart and there should be a way to stop the process without 
having it automatically restarted.  I've written scripts to do this but 
there's got to be a standard or commonly used utility out there to do 
this.  I read that Debian has something called restartd.  Ideally, I'd 
like something that is actively supported open source and compiles/runs 
on Fedora.  Recommendations?