Reboot if web service (tomcat7) is not responding - shell

Question

I am running a web app on a Tomcat server. There is a hard-to-detect problem within the server code that causes it to crash once or twice everyday. I will dig in to correct it when I have time. But until that day, in a problematic case restarting tomcat (/etc/init.d/tomcat7 restart) or basically rebooting the machine also seem pretty good solutions for now. I want to detect liveliness of server with wget instead of grep or something else because even though tomcat is running my service may be down.
wget localhost:8080/MyService/
outputs
--2012-12-04 14:10:20-- http://localhost:8080/MyService/
Resolving localhost... 127.0.0.1
Connecting to localhost|127.0.0.1|:8080... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2777 (2.7K) [text/html]
Saving to: “index.html.3”
100%[======================================>] 2,777 --.-K/s in 0s
2012-12-04 14:10:20 (223 MB/s) - “index.html.3” saved [2777/2777]
when my service is up. And outputs
Resolving localhost... 127.0.0.1
Connecting to localhost|127.0.0.1|:8080... failed: Connection refused.
or just stucks after saying
--2012-12-04 14:07:34-- http://localhost:8080/MyService/
Resolving localhost... 127.0.0.1
Connecting to localhost|127.0.0.1|:8080... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
otherwise. Can you offer me a shell script with a cron job or something else to do that. I prefer not to use cron if there is an alternative.

Answer 1

Why not using cron for that? Anyway ig oogled for tomcat + watchdog and found the following blog post.
Should give you and idea how to solve your problem.
hth

Answer 2

OK I find the solution to add a script under /etc/rc5.d/ as told here http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/mandriva-linux/27687-how-make-command-run-startup.html
!/bin/bash
echo "Restarted: " `date` >> /home/ec2-user/reboot.log
sleep 600
while [ 1 ]
do
var=`php -f /home/ec2-user/lastEntry.php`
if [ ${#var} -gt 3 ]
then
echo "Restarting: " `date` >> /home/ec2-user/reboot.log
reboot
fi
sleep 60
done
where last query checks a table to see if is there any entry in last 10 mins.
<?php
mysql_connect('ip', 'uname', 'pass') or die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db("db") or die(mysql_error());
$query="SELECT min(now()-time) as last FROM table;";
$result = mysql_query($query)or die(mysql_error());
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result);
echo $row['last'];
?>
There are more straightforward ways to check if tomcat is running but this checks on the last output so more accurate check it's.