Alas I can't recall what thread I was linking.
Having a watchdog you've written into a cron is an option, for sure.
I believe Jeremy was asking about how to make a service definition that handles the restarting, which will depend on your service daemon. I can try to assist with looking into a particular daemon, if requested.
About the easiest, platform-independent way to get a Mango to restart if something gets bad is to put a process event handler on the System Startup event to touch /path/to/Mango/RESTART
which will use the mechanisms in the startup scripts to restart Mango. This will fail if the startup fails, but so would any other restart method. Using this you could get a rudimentary persistence by simply adding the launch command into your rc.local. This would cause your Mango to restart if you issued an ./ma.sh stop, as well, or a kill -9 to Java, etc. You would have to kill the ma-start.sh script to kill the restarting.
Other than that, it'll be service definitions I would advise for starting / restarting Mango.