After investigating SOAP further there seems to be a common confusion regarding the difference between rpc/literal and document/literal and how it is handled in PHP. There is even a bug 49169 reported because PHP ext/soap maps all operations defined in the web service with the same signature to the first defined function or method in [...]
Handling SOAP structures in PHP can sometimes be really annoying. If an interface is defined in the WSDL as returning an array I can’t be sure that I will get an array. If there is only one element in the array PHP tries to be clever and turn the wanted array into an object which, [...]