Nothing obvious in error logs either.

Nevertheless it would be good to know what is being written there.

When you set up a webservice, you are probably interested in accessing the server's methods from wherever, so your web application is one more client. What you need to call is the client script.

If everything works fine from the command line, then all you need to care about is sending the information you get from the server into the browser. Since I don't know your code, I can only guess that maybe you are forgetting to send the content-type header to the browser?

update The content-type be text/html. Before you send anything to the browser you must print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";

The WSDL describes the service being provided, its methods, data types, how to reach it, etc. Read WSDL Tutorial for an understanding about its purpose and syntax.