Hey Adnan
Thank you for your question - there are quite a few concepts that you've touched on.
First, S/4HANA is an SAP provided business application, built to run on the SAP HANA technology platform. The application stack for S/4HANA is called NetWeaver, a mature application platform used by many SAP applications. ABAP is a language supported by the Netweaver stack.
While SAP HANA is a core technology for S/4HANA, it does not only support SAP Applications (such as S/4HANA, SAP Business Suite, SAP B/W), but, application developers, ISVs, and startups can develop and commercialize next generation applications using the SAP HANA technology, or companies can use SAP HANA internally for a number of use cases not directly associated with SAP Applications.
A good example of this, is using SAP HANA to build an "agile data mart", or potentially a data warehouse, and consolidate analytical requirements with SAP HANA - companies do this to take advantage of the in-memory performance associated with SAP HANA, and to take advantage of a number of machine learning (and other) capabilities in SAP HANA.
The XS development paradigm is associated with developing applications on the SAP HANA platform - it is an alternative and newer development approach to developing applications on the Netweaver stack, and is based on the open source CloudFoundry framework. XS applications are “native” to SAP HANA – typically data driven, business critical applications, often built to extend SAP applications with new requirements, or completely new applications. A key feature of the XS application stack is the support of “buildpacks” which support a range of popular languages, such as Node.Js.
SAP HANA, express edition (referring to it as HXE for the rest of the post) is a small footprint of the SAP HANA technology – the purpose of the solution is to provide developers with a free version of SAP HANA to develop new applications or business solutions. It includes the XS stack for developing native HANA applications. S/4HANA does not run on SAP HANA, express edition, but, you could develop an SAP HANA application (using HXE) which extends S/4 functionality, which would give you the ability to use popular development languages, a new web based development environment, and a list of other features you can read about here.
My recommendation would be to review this free online course, which covers a lot of ground, and would provide more clarity on they kinds of application development features are available with the XS model
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