I'm not sure what would trigger this error, but I'd be very interested to hear the results if you could track it down.  You could edit the javascript file to check if the function exists, and record some debug information if it does not exist.  This would help in tracking down the cause of the problem.

I think I've found the problem.

In richfaces.js there's following code.( start from line 13)

(function(jQuery, richfaces) {

.......

   then the author used both $ and jQuery in this block. He premised var $ existed in the globle scope.

}(jQuery, RichFaces));

which is WRONG.

it should be

(function($, richfaces) {

.......

}(jQuery, RichFaces));

or never use $ in the block because user could call jQuery.noConflict() anywhere to remove the definition of $ in the global scope.

It's a theme of this pull request:

https://github.com/richfaces4/core/pull/17

and issue:

https://issues.jboss.org/browse/RF-12833

We should really use one - either $ or jQuery.

As suggested in a issue, you can patch the richfaces.js manually and use RichFaces Resource Mapping to provide patched resource.

Imo we should address this problem in scope of 4.3.3 and replace all conflicting occurences of $.

+1 - can you make sure there is a jira filed and scheduled to address this?