如何从Rest Web Service转换到PHP？

Question

I created a URI: http://aserver.al.fi.uc.up.pt/~awX/rest/article/ (example) that works fine delivering the information in XML, but now I want to consume this URL in PHP and all I get is a blank page. I have tried several things including the following:

<?php
ini_set('display_errors', '1');
$response = file_get_contents('http://aserver.al.fi.uc.up.pt/~awX/rest/article/');
$response = simplexml_load_string($response);
echo $response;
?>

I'm new to all of this, so probably I'm missing some important or simple information, but I'm not finding anything helpful that works.

Thanks in advance!