Does it fail the same way when running in debug mode from command line ? i..e not within tools ?
if yes, then I would say this question is better asked on richfaces forum than here.
if no, ...I got no idea why we should be different.
You write "when I try to run the app in debug mode on eclipse IDE" does that mean you did not run this in non-debug mode ?
Could it be that the difference is not about debug, but about you using i.e. mvn to build and deploy the war and then run tomcat manually vs
using eclipse and running tomcat directly?
Then the difference is to be found in how you have configured eclipse to build/deploy the app.